"Now, sir, please go on with your teaming. I ken the lay of the land about Mullein Hill
"'Whether the simmer kindly warms
Wi' life and light,
Or winter howls in gusty storms
The lang, dark night.'"
But I did not go on with the teaming. Gravel is a thing that will wait. Here it lies where it was dumped by the glaciers of the Ice Age. There was no hurry about it; whereas pilgrims and poets from Dubuque must be stopped as they pass. So we sat down and talked—of books and men, of poems and places, but mostly of books,—books I had written, and other books—great books "whose dwelling is the light of setting suns." Then we walked—over the ridges, down to the meadow and the stream, and up through the orchard, still talking of books, my strange visitor, whether the books were prose or poetry, catching up the volume somewhere with a favorite passage, and going on—reading on—from memory, line after line, pausing only to repeat some exquisite turn, or to comment upon some happy thought.
Not one book was he giving me, but many. The tiny leather-bound copy of Burns that he drew from his coat pocket he did not give me, however, but fondly holding it in his hands said:—
"It was my mother's. She always read to us out of it. She knew every line of it by heart as I do.
"'Some books are lies frae end to end'—
but this is no one of them. I have carried it these many years."
Our walk brought us back to the house and into the cool living-room where a few sticks were burning on the hearth. Taking one of the rocking-chairs before the fireplace, the Pilgrim sat for a time looking into the blaze. Then he began to rock gently back and forth, his eyes fixed upon the fire, quite forgetful evidently of my presence, and while he rocked his lips moved as, half audibly, he began to speak with some one—not with me—with some one invisible to me who had come to him out of the flame. I listened as he spoke, but it was a language that I could not understand.
Then remembering where he was he turned to me and said, his eyes going back again beyond the fire,—
"She often comes to me like this; but I am very lonely since she left me,—lonely—lonely—and so I came on to Concord to visit Thoreau's grave."