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.