The daily mails became matters of intense interest and expectation. Albert wrote regularly and of course well and entertainingly. He described the life at the camp where he and the other recruits were training, a camp vastly different from the enormous military towns built later on for housing and training the drafted men. He liked the life pretty well, he wrote, although it was hard and a fellow had precious little opportunity to be lazy. Mistakes, too, were unprofitable for the maker. Captain Lote's eye twinkled when he read that.
Later on he wrote that he had been made a corporal and his grandmother, to whom a major general and a corporal were of equal rank, rejoiced much both at home and in church after meeting was over and friends came to hear the news. Mrs. Ellis declared herself not surprised. It was the Robert Penfold in him coming out, so she said.
A month or two later one of Albert's letters contained an interesting item of news. In the little spare time which military life afforded him he continued to write verse and stories. Now a New York publisher, not one of the most prominent but a reputable and enterprising one, had written him suggesting the collecting of his poems and their publication in book form. The poet himself was, naturally, elated.
“Isn't it splendid!” he wrote. “The best part of it, of course, is that he asked to publish, I did not ask him. Please send me my scrapbook and all loose manuscript. When the book will come out I'm sure I don't know. In fact it may never come out, we have not gotten as far as terms and contracts yet, but I feel we shall. Send the scrapbook and manuscript right away, PLEASE.”
They were sent. In his next letter Albert was still enthusiastic.
“I have been looking over my stuff,” he wrote, “and some of it is pretty good, if you don't mind my saying so. Tell Grandfather that when this book of mine is out and selling I may be able to show him that poetry making isn't a pauper's job, after all. Of course I don't know how much it will sell--perhaps not more than five or ten thousand at first--but even at ten thousand at, say, twenty-five cents royalty each, would be twenty-five hundred dollars, and that's something. Why, Ben Hur, the novel, you know, has sold a million, I believe.”