Page:Famous Single Poems (1924).djvu/318

 . Such papers as were familiar with the evidence came at once to Mr. Greene’s support, and a few of them treated Mrs. Jones with a disrespectful hilarity which, as appeared subsequently, was very galling to her proud Southern spirit. It was suggested, among other things, that if the people of Vermilion Parish had not been so busy painting the town red they would have known that this particular controversy had been settled long before, and that if Mrs. Jones wanted to claim something that was still in doubt she should have entered her name for “Beautiful Snow,” or “Solitude,” or “There Is No Death.”

There were, however, a considerable number of romantic males who felt their chivalrous instincts stirred by this feminine appeal for justice, and who leaped, pen in hand, to the support of Mrs. Jones, though they must have deplored the fact that her name was not more picturesque. Among her most doughty champions was J. Andrew Boyd, who occupied an editorial position on the Wilkesbarre (Pa.) News–Leader. He started proceedings by writing Mrs. Jones “in the interest of justice alone and very pointedly asked her if she really was the author” of the poem in question, stating that “Mr. Homer Greene also claimed it as a child of his own brain.”

“Most assuredly I wrote the poem,” Mrs.