"I need 'finish,'" I suggested in one of the long pauses.
"I was just going to suggest it," said the lady.
"You say you are going to Southey's old home tomorrow—may I go, too?" I ventured.
And the answer was, "Of course—if you will promise not to work me up into copy."
I promised.
I found lodgings that night at "Nab Cottage." Being well recommended, the landlady did not hesitate, but gave me the best accommodations her house afforded.
Hartley Coleridge does not live at "Nab Cottage" now—a moss-covered slab marks his resting-place up at the Grasmere Churchyard, and only a step away in a very straight row are similar old headstones that token the graves of William, Dorothy and Mary Wordsworth. Hartley Coleridge had most of the weaknesses of his father, and only a few of his better traits. Yet Southey brought up the children of Coleridge and gave them just as good advantages as he did his own.
"It is not 'advantages' that make great men—it is disadvantages!" said White Pigeon. We were eating breakfast at the table set out under the arbor, back of the Coleridge cottage—Grace, Myrtle, White Pigeon and I.
Grace and Myrtle were the Grand Rapids girls, and fine girls, too—pink and twenty, with diaries and autograph-fans. Girls of that age are charming, but they only interest me as do beautiful kittens or colts. Women do not become wise or discreet until they are past thirty. White Pigeon was past thirty.