They pressed nearer, presenting a compact semicircle of awed faces, and nodded eagerly. An older boy giggled in excess of joy and in anticipation of what was to come, and his neighbors rebuked him with frowns.
“Now, when I say ‘one,’ begin to count, and count ten slowly—oh, very slowly; and then, when everybody has counted, everybody stand on one foot with eyes shut tight and hop around real quick and look at the back wall of the garden—there’s a robin sitting there at this very minute;—but don’t look. Nobody must look—yet! And when you open your eyes there will be a fairy in a linen duster and a cocked hat; that is, maybe you’ll see him! Now shut your eyes and count—one!”
When they swung round to take him to task for this duplicity, he had reached the street and was waving his hand to them.
II
Under the maples that arched the long street the Poet walked homeward, pondering the afternoon’s adventures. His encounter with the children had sent him away from Mrs. Waring’s garden in a happy mood. Down the long aisle of trees the tall shaft of the soldiers’ monument rose before him. He had watched its building, and the memories that had gone to its making had spoken to his imagination with singular poignancy. It expressed the high altitudes of aspiration and endeavor of his own people; for the gray shaft was not merely the center of his city, the teeming, earnest capital of his State; but his name and fame were inseparably linked to it. He had found within an hour’s journey of the monument the material for a thousand poems. As a boy he had ranged the near-by fields and followed, like a young Columbus, innumerable creeks and rivers; he had learned and stored away the country lore and the country faith, and fixed in his mind unconsciously the homely speech in which he was to express these things later as one having authority. So profitably had he occupied his childhood and youth that years spent on “paven ground” had not dimmed the freshness of those memories. It seemed that by some magic he was able to cause the springs he had known in youth (and springs are dear to youth!) to bubble anew in the crowded haunts of men; and urban scenes never obscured for him the labors and incidents of the farm. He had played upon the theme of home with endless variations, and never were songs honester than these. The home round which he had flung his defense of song domiciled folk of simple aims and kindly mirth; he had established them as a type, written them down in their simple dialect that has the tang of wild persimmons, the mellow flavor of the pawpaw.
He turned into the quiet street from which for many years he had sent his songs winging,—an absurdly inaccessible and delightful street that baffled all seekers,—that had to be rediscovered with each visit by the Poet’s friends. Not only was its seclusion dear to him; but the difficulties experienced by his visitors in finding it tickled his humor. It was pleasant to be tucked away in a street that never was in danger of precipitating one into the market-place, and in a house set higher than its neighbors and protected by an iron fence and a gate whose chain one must fumble a moment before gaining access to the whitest of stone steps, and the quaint door that had hospitably opened to so many of the good and great of all lands.
There was a visitor waiting—a young man who explained himself diffidently and seemed taken aback by the cordiality with which the Poet greeted him.
“Frederick Fulton,” repeated the Poet, waving his hand toward a chair. “You are not the young man who sent me a manuscript to read last summer,—and very long it was, indeed, a poetic drama, ‘The Soul of Eros.’ Nor the one who wrote an ode in hexameters ‘To the Spirit of Shelley,’ nor yet the other one who seemed bent on doing Omar Khayyám over again—‘Verses from Persian Sources’ he called it. You needn’t bother to repudiate those efforts; I have seen your name in the ‘Chronicle’ tacked to very good things—very good, and very American. Yes, I recall half a dozen pieces under one heading—‘Songs of Journeys’ End’—and good work—excellent! I suppose they were all refused by magazines or you wouldn’t have chucked them into a Sunday supplement. Oh, don’t jump! I’m not a mind reader—it’s only that I’ve been through all that myself.”
“Not lately, though, of course,” Fulton remarked, with the laugh that the Poet’s smile invited.
“Not so lately, but they sent me back so much when I was young, and even after I wasn’t so young, that the account isn’t balanced yet! There are things in those verses of yours that I remember—they were very delicate, and beautifully put together,—cobwebs with dew clinging to them. I impudently asked about you at the office to make sure there really was a Frederick Fulton.”