"Yes," she said, in her delicate excitement, "I do. Oh, I'll tell you an' you'll see for yourself it must 'a' been him. It was one early afternoon towards the end o' summer, an' I knew him in a minute. I'd gone up to the depot to mail a postal on the Through, an' he got off the train an' went into the Telegraph Office. An' the train pulled out an' left him—it was down to the end o' the platform before he come out. He didn't act, though, as if the train's leavin' him was much of anything to notice. He just went up an' commenced talkin' to the baggageman, Bill. But Bill couldn't understand him—Bill was sort o' crusted over the mind—you had to say things over an' over again to him, an' even then he 'most always took it different from what you meant. So I suppose that was why the man left him an' come towards me.
"When I looked up in his face I stood still on the platform. He was young. An' he had soft hair, an' his face was beautiful, like he see heaven. It wasn't to say he was exactly like my picture," Calliope said slowly. "For instance, I think the man at the depot had a beard, an' the poet in my picture didn't. But it was more his look, you might say. It wasn't like any look I'd ever seen on anybody in Friendship. His hands were kind o' slim an' wanderin', an' he carried a book like it was his only baggage. An' he had a way—well, like what he happened to be doin' wasn't all day to him. Like he was partly there, but mostly somewheres else, where everything was better.
"'Perhaps this lady will know,' he says—an' it wasn't the way most of 'em talks here in Friendship, you understand—'I've been askin' the luggageman there,' he says, an' he was smilin' almost like a laugh at what he thought I was goin' to answer, 'I've been askin' the luggageman there, if he knows of a wood near the station that I shall be likely to find haunted at this hour. I've to wait for the 4.20, an' it's a bad time of day for a haunted wood, I'm afraid. The luggageman didn't seem to know.'
"An' then all at once I knew—I knew. Why, don't you see," Calliope cried, "I had to know! That was just the way we'd talked in my dream—kind of jokin' an' yet meanin' somethin', too—so's you felt all lifted up an' out o' the ordinary. An' then I knew who he was an' I see how everything was. Why, the girl that was me an' that was lonesome there in Friendship wasn't me, very much. Me bein' Calliope Marsh was the chance part, an' didn't count. But things was rilly the way I'd dreamed o' their bein.' Somehow, I had another self. An' I had dreamed o' bein' that self. An' there he stood, on the Friendship depot platform."
Calliope looked at me wistfully.
"You don't think I sound crazy, do you?" she asked.
And at my answer:—
"Well," she said, brightening, "that was how it was. An' it was like there hadn't been any first time an' like there wouldn't be any end. Like they was things bigger than time—an' lots nicer than life. An' I spoke up like I'd always known him.
"'Why, yes,' I says to him simple, 'you must mean the Depot Woods,' I said. 'They're always kind o' haunted to me. I guess the little folks that come in the en-gine smoke live in there,' I told him, smilin' because I was so glad.
"I remember how su'prised he looked an' how his face lit up, like he was hearin' English in a heathen land.