pathos, beautified by the cheer and optimism of the little
sufferer. Consequently when this couple left the hall I was very
anxious to know the reason and asked a friend to find out. He
learned that they had a little hunch-back child of their own.
After this experience I never used that recitation again. On the
other hand, it often required a long time for me to realize that
the public would enjoy a poem which, because of some blind
impulse, I thought unsuitable. Once a man said to me, 'Why don't
you recite When the Frost Is on the Punkin?' The use of it had
never occurred to me for I thought it 'wouldn't go.' He
persuaded me to try it and it became one of my most favored
recitations. Thus, I learned to judge and value my verses by
their effect upon the public. Occasionally, at first, I had
presumed to write 'over the heads' of the audience, consoling
myself for the cool reception by thinking my auditors were not of
sufficient intellectual height to appreciate my efforts. But
after a time it came home to me that I myself was at fault in
these failures, and then I disliked anything that did not appeal
to the public and learned to discriminate between that which did
not ring true to my hearers and that which won them by virtue of
its truthfulness and was simply heart high."

As a reader of his own poems, as a teller of humorous stories, as
a mimic, indeed as a finished actor, Riley's genius was rare and
beyond question. In a lecture on the Humorous Story, Mark Twain,
referring to the story of the One Legged Soldier and the
different ways of telling it, once said:

"It takes only a minute and a half to tell it in its comic form;
and it isn't worth telling after all. Put into the