“I guess not,” he objected. “I never get so full of scenery that I have no room left for real food. Do you know, that wonderful scene down there is enough to move anyone to poetry?”
“Stacy! Don’t you dare,” objected Elfreda. “There are some things that we long-suffering Riders cannot endure. Your alleged poetry is one of them.”
“Don’t worry. I’m not going to waste any of it on you folks. My uncle once had a hired man who wrote ‘pomes’ as he called them, and—”
“Is that where you acquired the habit?” inquired Emma, as the party sat down to their supper.
“Indeed not. I was born with the gift of expressing myself poetically,” answered Stacy, narrowly observing the effect of his statement on the Overlanders. “Poetic expression comes as naturally to me as partaking of food.”
A peal of laughter greeted Stacy’s assertion.
“What about the hired man?” questioned Grace, urging him on.
“He used to sit up in bed, smoking his pipe, and write poetry after the rest of the family had gone to bed. One night he went to sleep over his ‘pome’—”
“It must have been a lullaby that he was writing,” suggested Emma demurely.
“As I was saying,” resumed Stacy after a withering glance in Emma’s direction, “he went to sleep. His pipe set fire to my aunt’s comforter and burned the quilt half up before the poet woke up and yelled ‘fire!’ Uncle grabbed up a pail of soft soap, and, running upstairs, put out the fire with it. When uncle got through, that comforter and the ‘pome’ were a soapy mess. You couldn’t have picked the ‘pome’ out of the lather with a magnifying glass.”