"I can remember you when you were that high"

       She would turn away and bite her lip.

       "Listen Ed! This is how it goes!"

       They intimate that I had better take my few pennies and run 'round the corner to some little haberdashery.

       I thank them and walk in to the nearest dining-room table.

       "Why didn't you tell us that you were reading a paper on birth control?"

      Old scandals concerning the private life of Lord Byron have been revived with the recent publication of a collection of his letters. One of the big questions seems to be:

       Did Byron send Mary Shelley's letter to Mrs. R.B. Hoppner

      ? Everyone seems greatly excited about it.

      Lest future generations be thrown into turmoil over my correspondence after I am gone, I want right now to clear up the mystery which has puzzled literary circles for over thirty years. I need hardly add that I refer to what is known as the "Benchley-Whittier Correspondence."

      The big question over which both my biographers and Whittier's might possibly come to blows is this, as I understand it:

       Did John Greenleaf Whittier ever receive the letters I wrote to him in the late Fall of

      1890?

       If he did not, who did? And under what circumstances were they written

      ?

      I was a very young man at the time, and Mr. Whittier was, naturally, very old. There had been

       [pg 004]

      a meeting of the Save-Our-Song-Birds Club in old Dane Hall (now demolished) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Members had left their coats and hats in the check-room at the foot of the stairs (now demolished).

      In passing out after a rather spirited meeting, during the course of which Mr. Whittier and Dr. Van Blarcom had opposed each other rather violently over the question 

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