"Exactly," replied the new father.
The two rode down the street in silence; as they turned into the Barclay driveway Lycurgus chuckled, "Well—well—Susan B. Wants to put breeches on that child before she gets her eyes open." Then he turned on Barclay with a broad grin of fellowship, as he pinched the young man's leg and laughed, "Say—John—honest, ain't that just like a woman?"
And so Jeanette Thatcher Barclay came into this world, and what with her Grandmother Barclay uncovering her to look at the Thatcher nose, and her Grandmother Mason taking her to the attic so that she could go upstairs before she went down, that she might never come down in the world, and what with her Grandfather Mason rubbing her almost raw with his fuzzy beard before the women could scream at him, and what with her father trying to jostle her on his knee, and what with all the different things Mrs. Ward, the mother of six, would have done to her, and all the things Mrs. Culpepper, mother of three, would have done to her, and Mrs. McHurdie, mother of none, prevented the others from doing, Jeanette had rather an exciting birthday. And Jeanette Barclay as a young woman often looks at the scrap-book with its crinkly leaves and reads this item from the Daily Banner: "The angels visited our prosperous city again last Thursday, June 12, and left a little one named Jeanette at the home of our honoured townsman, John Barclay. Mother and child progressing nicely." But under this item is a long poem clipped from a paper printed a week later,—Jeanette has counted the stanzas many times and knows there are seventeen, and each one ends with "when the angels brought Jeanette." Her father used to read the verses to her to tease her when she was in her teens, and once when she was in her twenties, and Jeanette had the lonely poet out to dinner one Sunday, she sat with him on the sofa in the library, looking at the old scrap-book. Their eyes fell upon the verses about the angels bringing Jeanette, and the girl noticed the old man mumming it over and smiling.
"Tell me, Uncle Watts," she asked, "why did you make such a long poem about such a short girl?"
The poet ran his fingers through his rough gray beard, and went on droning off the lines, and grinning as he read. When he had finished, he took her pretty hand in his gnarly, bony one and patted the white firm flesh tenderly as he peered back through the years. "U-h-m, that was years and years ago, Jeanette—years and years ago, and Nellie had just bought me my rhyming dictionary. It was the first time I had a chance to use it." The lyrical artist drummed with his fingers on the mahogany arm of the sofa. "My goodness, child—what a long column there was of words rhyming with 'ette.'" He laughed to himself as he mused: "You know, my dear, I had to let 'brevet' and 'fret' and 'roulette' go, because I couldn't think of anything to say about them. You don't know how that worries a poet." He looked at the verses in the book before him and then shook his head sadly: "I was young then—it seems strange to think I could write that. Youth, youth," he sighed as he patted the fresh young hand beside him, "it is not by chance you rhyme with truth."
His eyes glistened, and the girl put her cheek against his and squeezed the thin, trembling hand as she cried, "Oh, Uncle Watts, Uncle Watts, you're a dear—a regular dear!"
"In his latter days," writes Colonel Culpepper, in the second edition of the Biography, "those subterranean fires of life that flowed so fervently in his youth and manhood smouldered, and he did not write often. But on occasion the flames would rise and burn for a moment with their old-time ardour. The poem 'After Glow' was penned one night just following a visit with a young woman, Jeanette, only daughter of Honourable and Mrs. John Barclay, whose birth is celebrated elsewhere in this volume under the title 'When the Angels brought Jeanette.' The day after the poem 'After Glow' was composed I was sitting in the harness shop with the poet when the conversation turned upon the compensations of age. I said: 'Sir, do you not think that one of our compensations is that found in the freedom and the rare intimacy with which we are treated by the young women? They no longer seem to fear us. Is it not sweet?' I asked. Our hero turned from his bench with a smile and a deprecating gesture as he replied softly, 'Ah, Colonel—that's just it; that's just the trouble.' And then he took from a box near by this poem, 'The After Glow,' and read it to me. And I knew the meaning of the line—
"'Oh, drowsy blood that tosses in its sleep.'
"And so we fell to talking of other days. And until the twilight came we sat together, dreaming of faded moons."