"What?" said the player approached. "You ask me to play with your nine, when only yesterday I got a personal letter from you entreating me not to do the very thing you are now asking of me? I guess not. You can't catch me that easy."
And so it continued all season. Whenever I was in a particularly tight place, and seeking to fill the ranks of our crippled team, one of these circulars, written by Mills, but signed by me, would be thrust under my nose. Mr. Mills has told me that he issued five hundred of these, but it seems to me I saw more than that in my experiences during that season's play.
When I returned to Chicago from my barnstorming trips, I undertook to explain to Messrs. Hulbert and Mills some of the embarrassments occasioned by the literary bureau they were carrying on in Chicago under my name. However, I received but very little sympathy from either of the gentlemen; they seemed to regard it as rather a good joke. They knew, of course, that I was in sympathy with the objects they were seeking to promote, but they were certainly more deeply interested in their purpose than they were in my perplexities. Finally I said to them:
"It's all right, gentlemen. I am in this thing. I will continue to stand for the high moral precepts so beautifully expressed and of which you have made me the literary sponsor; but won't you do this much? Won't you please mail me an author's advance proof of the many letters you are sending out over my signature—not that I want to alter the magnificent phraseology in the slight-
