Beautiful Snow
gave me the most serious annoyance was a rascal calling himself William H. Sigourney, and professing to be a nephew of the husband of Lydia Huntley Sigourney. He somehow secured an endorsement from the Galaxy Magazine, and on the strength of this traveled through the country making addresses at country fairs, reciting ‘Beautiful Snow’ and swindling the country people out of anything he could. He ran his career for several years, and every little while my eyes were gratified by a newspaper paragraph to the effect that the author of ‘Beautiful Snow’ had been arrested somewhere for obtaining goods under false pretenses, or picking pockets.
“There wasn’t much inducement for me at that time to proclaim myself as the author; but one day I saw in the Philadelphia Ledger the announcement that the author of ‘Beautiful Snow’ had shot himself and died on the Bloomingdale road the day before. I fancied I was rid of the fellow at last, but when I came back to New York I was disappointed to find that the report had originated with the Evening Post, and had been written by a man who had claimed to be the author of the poem and who, when threatened with arrest for some rascality, took this means of avoiding it.
“A few months later the papers announced that the author of ‘Beautiful Snow’ had been
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