The interview appeared the next afternoon.

“VAGABOND POET ARRIVES.

LAUREL ENROLLS BOX-CAR STUDENT.”

It made me a nine days’ wonder with the students.  I caught the men staring at me, the girls shyly observing me, as I strode from class room to class room....

But the reek of the stable.  It went with me like a ghost everywhere.  Maybe it was because I had no change of suits ...  I saw that it was noticeable to others, and I sat ’way back, in a seat apart, by myself.

* * * * *

Langworth watched my progress narrowly the first few weeks.

One afternoon as I was passing his house he beckoned me in.

“You’re making good, and I’m glad of it ... because they’re looking on you as my protege ... holding me responsible for you.  Munday, in the Schiller class, tells me you sometimes bring in your daily lesson in Wilhelm Tell, translated into blank verse ... and good stuff, too....  And King says he turns over the most difficult lines in Horace in class for you to translate and construe.”

Langworth had only half the truth from King.

Whenever the latter came upon a passage a little off colour, he put me on it, chuckling to himself ... he knew I would go right through with it without hesitation.

* * * * *

About this time I received a letter from William Hayes Ward, editor of the New York Independent.  He informed me that he had taken a poem of mine.  And, as indubitable proof, he enclosed a check for five dollars.

Professor Langworth was himself a poet of no mean ability:  he was pleased to hear that I had sold a poem to the Independent.

* * * * *

I was sick of being shunned because I carried stable smells about with me wherever I went.

Also, sanguinely, with the sale of my first poem, I was sure that my literary career had begun, and that from now on I would be enabled to earn my living by my pen, and pay my way as a student, too.  So I threw up the job that made me smell so unpleasantly.

* * * * *

The city of Laurel had been, in the early days, in the memory of settlers yet living a hale life, a pioneer outpost.  Through it flowed a great, muddy river.  The flat roofs of its main street still preserved a frontier appearance.  It was surrounded by high, wind-swept bluffs.

They still talked of the Quantrell raid and repeated the story of it ... and of how the six men were lynched under the bridge that swung over the dam....

At the time of the slavery agitation its citizens had encouraged the negroes to escape, had petted them, idealised them as no human beings of any race should be idealised ... had run schools specially for them where it was considered an honour for the women of the settlers to teach.