By

GUY BARNABAS BONE

          THE ancestors of our Author came to America in the year 1675 and settled at Southold, Long Island, at that time a wilderness.

          The Griffin family came from County Essex, England.

          One branch of the family still retain the old home at Saffron Walden, near Epping forest, the home of the present Baron Braybrooke. The author of this book, Griffin, we call him Griff or Dick. He first saw the light when he was very young in the city of New York. Whilst still a child the whole bunch migrated to beyond the meadows and settled down at Kettle Creek, New Jersey. They lived on a cranberry bog. At this time young Griff's vocation was driving horses to pasture and washing dishes. This exciting existence lasted for some years. When Griff was sixteen he was sent to New York City and put to work, being placed as an office boy in a shipping office on South Street along the docks, one dollar per week being allowed the lad to pay for mid-day lunches and the weekly wash. The lunch question was rather hard on the growing boy, as for the wash question well, that did not matter. Those were the days of paper collars and cuffs.

          Dick soon found himself holding up a spear at Booth's Theatre. About this time Griff wrote a two-act tragedy, entitled the "Blood Monger's Vengeance." When Griff's employer (an Uncle) heard of this there was big commotion. The plan had been to make Griff a Merchant Prince. Everything fell through. Grill was bundled off to board at a retired School Master's at Wilton, Connecticut. The retired School Master turned out to be a first-class drunkard whose chief amusement consisted in picking up small rocks, studying their anatomy and then throwing said rock at the nearest passer-by. So Dick up and skips back to town. For the next fifteen years Griff worked in the theatre doing everything from property boy up to leading business. Griff became a real live actor. Next Griff turns to foreign travel, London, Paris, Switzerland. Dick finally found himself among the Basque smugglers on the borderland in the mountains between France and Spain. Dick was one dandy mixer.

          Now comes a change, oh wondrous change. We find Griff transported Westward Ho, a regular cowboy in far-off Texas. His cowboy friends called him "Lariat Dick." This is the time Griff became interested in scorpions, snakes and spiders. Next came the Spanish War. Griff enlisted and went to the front. After that "Bug House Poetry" more Texas, more scorpions, more spiders, more snakes. Then came the World War. Griff entered the U. S. Secret Service and started-in to work in earnest. On the early morning of July 9, 1917, at one A. M., Griff was attacked by a German spy in the lobby of the Marlborough Hotel, New York City. Dick was choked and very roughly handled, but held his own, and at the end of the scrimmage the spy had one dandy black eye and one swelled nozzle, and several teeth on the blink. The spy was sent to a detention camp in Georgia, where he wore white flannel and played lawn tennis. This escapade gained the victor the title of "One-round Griff."

          Since the war Griff has settled down in quaint old Greenwich Village, surrounded by all kinds of bugs.

          Go see Griff and get him to show you his specimens of scorpions, snakes and spiders.

GUY BARNABAS BONE.

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