Which couldn't have failed to create a laugh, for James Whitcomb Riley, with all his easy going ways, is one of the best dressed men in Indianapolis.
He is the faultlessly attired gentleman who daily walks out of Lockerbie Street with a gold headed cane and often with a white carnation in his buttonhole, as he starts down-town for his publishers. And before he's gone far, he has accumulated a following of children. If there is a little red headed boy at the house with the blue pump, standing on a fence rail
"At the corner grocery he has often dropped in."
playing telephone with the clothes line, Mr. Riley calls "Hello Amber Locks!" The first time they met, he lifted the boy over the fence, sat him down on the ground, looked at him gently, and said, "Son, you've got hair just like Hum used to have. Hum was my little brother, and grandmother called him Amber Locks." And as he goes on down the street, there isn't a child that he misses. He knows them all by name.
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