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392 FAMOUS LIVING AMERICANS In the course of his ramblings over Indiana his propensity to write asserted itself and he found his way to country news- paper offices. With at least two of these, one an Anderson and the other a Kokomo paper, he established more than casual relations, forming lasting friendships with the editors and contributing many of his earliest productions to their col- umns. In them he first tried his poetical wings. It was when he began to contribute to the Indianapolis Journal^ however, that his literary career really began. The Journal, an old well-established paper, had always given more or less attention to matters not strictly of a news character and was especially hospitable to writers of the state. On its staff at that time were several men who were keenly appre- ciative of Uterary merit and quick to discern originality. Mr. Riley's offerings, some of them in dialect, received hearty welcome and began to appear with great frequency. They soon aroused much interest and led to inquiries from the Journal's readers concerning the new writer. These patrons were largely of a class ready to appreciate literary talent, while the weekly Journal, made up from the daily edition, cir- culated widely in the country districts of the state and gave the people there their first acquaintance with a poet whom they could understand and who seemed to speak for them. Meanwhile, Mr. Riley himself was a frequent visitor to the Journal office, coming over from his home in Greenfield and before many months taking up his residence in Indianapolis, which city has since been his permanent home and with which he is closely identified. He made the Journal office his head- quarters, and from that time, in the middle seventies, until 1904 when the Journal was sold and was merged with The Star, a desk there was assigned to his use and there he wrote perhaps the greater number of his poems. But he was not a methodical ** regular'* worker. He was never one of the authors of whom it is related that they pro- duce a certain number of words each day and accomplish the task at fixed hours. He wrote when the spirit moved him, when the inspiration came. He fell into the ways of the morning newspaper and formed a habit of dropping into its