"The Peri and the Pearl," a clever skit of a poem of two hundred lines, just finished, white hot from his brain, won the heart of the editor of a San Francisco magazine published in the interest of a great railroad.

When the editor wrote, offering him payment in transportation, Martin wrote back to inquire if the transportation was transferable.

It was not, and so, being prevented from peddling it, he asked for the return of the poem.

Back it came, with the editor's regrets, and Martin sent it to San Francisco again, this time to The Hornet, a pretentious monthly that had been fanned into a constellation of the first magnitude by the brilliant journalist who founded it.

But The Hornet's light had begun to dim long before Martin was born.