But The Globe, a Chicago magazine, gave Martin the most cruel treatment of all.  He had refrained from offering his “Sea Lyrics” for publication, until driven to it by starvation.  After having been rejected by a dozen magazines, they had come to rest in The Globe office.  There were thirty poems in the collection, and he was to receive a dollar apiece for them.  The first month four were published, and he promptly received a cheek for four dollars; but when he looked over the magazine, he was appalled at the slaughter.  In some cases the titles had been altered:  “Finis,” for instance, being changed to “The Finish,” and “The Song of the Outer Reef” to “The Song of the Coral Reef.”  In one case, an absolutely different title, a misappropriate title, was substituted.  In place of his own, “Medusa Lights,” the editor had printed, “The Backward Track.”  But the slaughter in the body of the poems was terrifying.  Martin groaned and sweated and thrust his hands through his hair.  Phrases, lines, and stanzas were cut out, interchanged, or juggled about in the most incomprehensible manner.  Sometimes lines and stanzas not his own were substituted for his.  He could not believe that a sane editor could be guilty of such maltreatment, and his favorite hypothesis was that his poems must have been doctored by the office boy or the stenographer.  Martin wrote immediately, begging the editor to cease publishing the lyrics and to return them to him.

He wrote again and again, begging, entreating, threatening, but his letters were ignored.  Month by month the slaughter went on till the thirty poems were published, and month by month he received a check for those which had appeared in the current number.

Despite these various misadventures, the memory of the White Mouse forty-dollar check sustained him, though he was driven more and more to hack-work.  He discovered a bread-and-butter field in the agricultural weeklies and trade journals, though among the religious weeklies he found he could easily starve.  At his lowest ebb, when his black suit was in pawn, he made a ten-strike—­or so it seemed to him—­in a prize contest arranged by the County Committee of the Republican Party.  There were three branches of the contest, and he entered them all, laughing at himself bitterly the while in that he was driven to such straits to live.  His poem won the first prize of ten dollars, his campaign song the second prize of five dollars, his essay on the principles of the Republican Party the first prize of twenty-five dollars.  Which was very gratifying to him until he tried to collect.  Something had gone wrong in the County Committee, and, though a rich banker and a state senator were members of it, the money was not forthcoming.  While this affair was hanging fire, he proved that he understood the principles of the Democratic Party by winning the first prize for his essay in a similar contest.  And, moreover, he received the money, twenty-five dollars.  But the forty dollars won in the first contest he never received.