Then Sandy took up the subject of Kid Sadler. He felt there was need of more virtue and valor. He took Kid Sadler and decorated him. He fitted him with picturesque detail. The Kid bothered him with his raucous voice, froth-dripped mustache, lean throat, black mighty hands, and smell of uncleanness. But Sandy chose him as a poet. It seemed a good start. Gracia surprised him by looking startled and quite tearful, where the poet says:
“Nobody cares who Bill Smith is,
An neither does Bill Smith;”
which had seemed to Sandy only an accurate statement.
But the Kid's poetry needed expurgation and amendment. Sandy did it conscientiously, and spent hours searching for lines of similar rhyme, which would not glance so directly into byways and alleys that were surprising.
“A comin' home,
A roamin' home—”
“I told the Kid,” he added critically, “roamin' wasn't a good rhyme, but he thought it was a pathetic word.”
“Oh, when I was a little boy 't was things I did n't know,
An when I growed I knowed a lot of things that was n't so;