Frank Randall, tinsmith and plumber, who ran his shop on the main street, rented me a back room over his store, for two dollars a week. It had been occupied by big Sam, the negro shoemaker, and it was neither in order, nor did it smell very sweet. But I cleaned and aired it, and sprinkled disinfectant about that I had bought at the drug store.
Then I fetched my books down from Langworth's in a wheelbarrow, and I set them up in several neat rows.
I lay back on my cot and looked at them in satisfaction and happiness. I had enough for food and lodging for nearly three months, if I cooked for myself. Two dollars a week for food and two for rent, and I'd do my own washing ... say five a week at the most! that would mean twelve weeks of doing nothing but reading and writing and studying.
The first day of my sojourn over the tinsmith's shop, Sunday, I drew down from the shelf my Heinrich Heine ... in German ... one of the tasks I set myself, during that three months, was the making an intensive study of just how Heine had "swung" the lyric form to such conciseness, such effectiveness of epigrammatic expression.
I opened the Buch der Lieder at the poem in his preface—the song of the sphinx in the enchanted wood ... and how it clutched the seeker, the poet, to its monstrous but voluptuous woman's breasts as it ravished his soul with kisses. And the nightingale was singing....
"O, shöne Sphinx, O löse mir
Das Rätsel, das wunderbare!
Ich hab' darüber nachgedacht
Schon manche tausand Yahre."