An now I know a few things that's useful an selected:
As how to put hard liquor where hard liquor is expected—”
and so on, different verses, which the Kid called his “Sing Song.” Sandy's judgment hung in doubt over this whether the lines were objectionable. He tempered the taste of the working literary artist for distinct flavor, and his own for that which is accurate, with the cautions of a village library committee, and decided on,
“An puts them things in moral verse to uses onexpected.”
“I don't know what he meant by 'onexpected,'” Sandy commented with a sense of helplessness, “but maybe he meant that he didn't know what he did mean. Because poets,” getting more and more entangled, “poets are that kind they can take a word and mean anything in the neighborhood, or something that'll occur to 'em next week.”
Gracia admired the Kid, though Miss Elizabeth thought she ought to refer to him as Mr. Sadler, which seemed a pity. And she declared a violent love for Little Irish, because “his auburn hair turned bricky red with falling down a well,” and because he wished to climb hills by stepping on the back of his neck. It was like Alice's Adventures, and especially like the White Knight's scheme to be over a wall by putting his head on top and standing on his head.
After all humors and modifications, Sandy's story was a wild and strange thing. It took new details from day to day, filling in the picture. To Gracia's imagination it spread out beyond romance, full of glooms, flashes, fascinations, dangers of cities, war and wilderness, and in spite of Sandy's self-indifference, it was he who dominated the pilgrimage, coloring it with his comment. The pilgrim appeared to be a person to whom the Valley of the Shadow of Death was equally interesting with Vanity Fair, and who entering the front gate of the Celestial City with rejoicing would presently want to know whither the back gate would take him. It seemed a pilgrimage to anywhere in search of everything, but Gracia began to fancy it was meant to lead specially to the new garden gate that opened so broadly on the street, and so dreamed the fancy into belief. She saw Sandy in imagination coming out of the pit-black night and lying down in the tool-house by the wet shining path. The white gate was justified.
Sandy's convalescence was not a finished thing, but he was beginning to feel energy starting within him. Energy! He knew the feeling well. It was something that snarled and clawed by fits.
“I'm a wildcat,” he said to himself reflectively, “sitting on eggs. Why don't he get off? Now,” as if addressing a speculative question for instance to Kid Sadler, “he could n't expect to hatch anything, could he?”
It was such a question as the Kid would have been pleased with, and have considered justly. “Has he got the eggs?”