"Well?"
The gloom of a great disappointment was in their voices.
"He's not an Arnold, after all," they said.
III
A POET OF GRASSY FORD
T
he lesser Primrose was a poet. It was believed in Grassy Ford, though the grounds seem vague enough now that I come to think of them, that he published widely in the literary journals of the day. Letitia was seen to post large envelopes, and anon to draw large envelopes from the post-office and hasten home with them. The former were supposed to contain poems; the latter, checks. Be that as it may, I never saw the Primrose name in print save in our Grassy Ford Weekly Gazette. There, when gossip lagged, you would find it frequently in a quiet upper corner, set "solid," under the caption "Gems"—a terse distinction from the other bright matters with which our journal shone, and further emphasized by the Gothic capitals set in a scroll of stars. Thus modestly, I believe, were published for the first time—and I fear the last—David Buckleton Primrose's "Agamemnon," "Ode to Jupiter," "Ulysses's Farewell," "Lines on Rereading Dante," "November: an Elegy Written in the Autumn of Life," as well as those stirring bugle-calls, "To Arms!" "John Brown," and "The Guns of Sumter," and those souvenirs of more playful tender moods, "To a Lady," "When I was a Rugby Lad," "Thanksgiving Pies," and "Lines Written in a Young Lady's Album on her Fifteenth Birthday." Now that young lady was Letitia, I chance to know, for I have seen the verses in her school-girl album, a little leathern Christmas thing stamped with forget-me-nots now faded, and there they stand just opposite some school-mate's doggerel of "roses red and violets blue" signed Johnny Gray. The lines begin, I remember:
"Virtue is in thy modest glance, sweet child,"