“Why, Johnnie Gregory!” he shook my hand warmly as if I were a prince.  I was enchanted.

“I want to exchange two books if I can—­for others!”

“Come right into the back.  Breasted, the boss, is out for the day....  I’m having my lunch sent in, won’t you have some with me?”

He acted just as if he hadn’t noticed my dilapidation.

I said I’d gladly share his lunch.

He drew my story out of me,—­the story of my life, in fact, before the afternoon wore to dusk.

* * * * *

“Do you think I’m crazy?” I asked him.

“No ... far from it ... " adding gently, with a smile, “sometimes an awful fool, though, Johnnie—­if I may say it.”

* * * * *

“Won’t you stay overnight?”

“No, thanks just the same, ‘Perfesser.’”

“I have room enough ... better hang around a few days and look for a job here.”

“It’s too near Haberford.”

“But I know you’d take a couple of fresh books, if I gave them to you, now wouldn’t you?”

My eyes lit up as with hunger.

“This Milton and Sterne are too used-up to be worth a nickel a-piece.  Maybe, if I’d keep them, they might be worth something, some day, when you’re famous,” he joked.

“If you want to give me a couple of books ... how about this Keats and this Ossian?  I want the Keats for myself.  It will renew my courage.  And—­the Ossian—­will you mail that book on for me, to Eos, to old Pfeiler?”

I had told him, in the course of my talking, about them both.

Pfeiler used often to talk of the greatness of Ossian’s poetry ... and how he’d like to possess a volume of it again ... that is, before he grew to hate me.

Maybe if I sent him the book, with a letter, he would think less harshly of me.

* * * * *

I tramped through New England.  My whole life had settled back into tramping ... only my Keats remained.  I read and re-read his poems, not caring to write a line myself.

* * * * *

I worked as a dish-washer or pearl-diver for several weeks in Boston, and bought a very cheap second-hand suit.

I shifted my mind like a weather vane and decided against shipping to England, with the forlorn hope of, somehow attending Oxford or Cambridge, and studying English literature there.  My old ideal of being a great adventurer and traveller had vanished, and, in its stead, came the desire to live a quiet life, devoted entirely to writing poetry, as the poet Gray lived his.

* * * * *

I drifted inland to Concord, a-foot, as a pilgrim to the town where Emerson and Thoreau had lived.  I was happy in loitering about the haunts of Thoreau; in sitting, full of thought, by the unhewn granite tombstone of Emerson, near the quiet of his grave.