CELEBRITIES
He had written lovely verses, touching hollyhocks and hearses, lotus-eaters, ladies, lilies, porcupines and pigs and pies, nothing human was beyond him, and admiring people conned him, adoration in their bosoms and a rapture in their eyes. He had sung of figs and quinces in the tents of Bedouin princes, he'd embalmed the Roman Forum and the Parthenon of Greece; many of his odes were written in the shrouding fogs of Britain, while he watched the suffrage ladies mixing things with the police.
So we met to do him honor; worshipper and eager fawner begged a tassel of his whiskers, or his autograph in ink; never was there so much sighin' round a pallid human lion, as he stood his lines explaining, taking out the hitch and kink!
All were in a joyous flutter, till we heard some fellow mutter: "Here comes Griggs, the southpaw pitcher, fairly burdened with his fame! He it was who beat the Phillies—gave the Quaker bugs the willies—he it was who saved our bacon in that 'leven-inning game!"
Then we crowded round the pitcher, making that great man the richer by a ton of adulation, in a red-hot fervor flung; and the poet, in a pickle, mused upon the false and fickle plaudits of the heartless rabble, till the dinner gong was rung!