business manager, were all in friendly contact with him.  He took out life insurance for the benefit of the wife and children he was later to have!  With the manager of the engraving department he was working out problems in connection with copperplate engraving and printing; with the official photographer, art photography; with the art director, some scheme for enlarging the local museum in some way.  With his enduring love of the fantastic and ridiculous it was not long before he had successfully planned and executed a hoax of the most ridiculous character, a piece of idle drollery almost too foolish to think of, and yet which eventually succeeded in exciting the natives of at least four States and was telegraphed to and talked about in a Sunday feature way, by newspapers all over the country, and finally involved Peter as an actor and stage manager of the most vivid type imaginable.  And yet it was all done really to amuse himself, to see if he could do it, as he often told me.

This particular hoax related to that silly old bugaboo of our boyhood days, the escaped and wandering wild man, ferocious, blood-loving, terrible.  I knew nothing of it until Peter, one Sunday afternoon when we were off for a walk a year or two after he had arrived in Newark, suddenly announced apropos of nothing at all, “Dreiser, I’ve just hit upon a great idea which I am working out with some of the boys down on our paper.  It’s a dusty old fake, but it will do as well as any other, better than if it were a really decent idea.  I’m inventing a wild man.  You know how crazy the average dub is over anything strange, different,’terrible.’  Barnum was right, you know.  There’s one born every minute.  Well, I’m just getting this thing up now.  It’s as good as the sacred white elephant or the blood-sweating hippopotamus.  And what’s more, I’m going to stage it right here in little old Newark—­and they’ll all fall for it, and don’t you think they won’t,” and he chuckled most ecstatically.

“For heaven’s sake, what’s coming now?” I sighed.

“Oh, very well.  But I have it all worked out just the same.  We’re beginning to run the preliminary telegrams every three or four days—­one from Ramblersville, South Jersey, let us say, another from Hohokus, twenty-five miles farther on, four or five days later.  By degrees as spring comes on I’ll bring him north—­right up here into Essex County—­a genuine wild man, see, something fierce and terrible.  We’re giving him long hair like a bison, red eyes, fangs, big hands and feet.  He’s entirely naked—­or will be when he gets here.  He’s eight feet tall.  He kills and eats horses, dogs, cattle, pigs, chickens.  He frightens men and women and children.  I’m having him bound across lonely roads, look in windows at night, stampede cattle and drive tramps and peddlers out of the country.  But say, wait and see.  As summer comes on we’ll make a regular headliner of it.  We’ll give it pages on Sunday.  We’ll get the rubes to looking for him in posses, offer rewards.  Maybe some one will actually capture and bring in some poor lunatic, a real wild man.  You can do anything if you just stir up the natives enough.”