Before I left, Langworth drew from me the admission that I was away behind in my board bill at the Farmers’ Restaurant.  My hopes of making immediate money as a writer of poems for the magazines had so far been barren of fruit.

“Sh! sit down a minute and wait.”  His wife was coming downstairs, querulously, waveringly; her eyes red from weeping.

“Laddie has just died.”

“The shepherd dog?” I enquired; for she had spoken as of a human demise.

“Yes, the dog ... but he was human, if anyone was.”  There was an acidulous resentment in the tone of her answer that indicated that she wanted her husband to send me away.

“She wants you to go,” whispered Langworth, humouring his wife like a sick child.  He escorted me into the storm porch.  “You have no idea,” he apologised defensively, “how human a dog can be, or how fond of one you can become....”

“What’s this?” I asked, taken aback.  He had thrust a check into my hand as he shook hands good-bye.

“It’s a check I’ve just endorsed over to you.  Royalties on a recent text-book.  Please do take it.”  I had intimated that I would probably be compelled to quit college and go on the tramp again ... confessing frankly, also, that a stationary life got on my nerves at times.

“I want you to keep on, not go back to the tramp life ... we’ll make something of you yet,” he jested, diffidently, steering me off when he noticed that I was about to heap profuse thanks on him.

“How can I ever thank you—­”

“By studying hard and making good.  By becoming the great poet I wanted to be.”

“But how can I pay this back?  It will take a long time—­”

“When you arrive at the place where you can afford to pay me back, pass it on to someone else who is struggling as you are now, and as I myself have struggled.”

* * * * *

Always, always I wrote my poetry and kept studying in my own fashion ... marks of proficiency, attendance at class went by the board.  My studying was rather browsing among the multitudes of books in the college library.  I passed hours, back in the stacks, forgetting day and night ... recitations ... meals....

I was soon in trouble with my professors ...  I was always up, and even ahead, with my studies, but I was a disrupting influence for the other students, because of my irregularity.

I discovered wonderful books back there in the “stack” ... the works of Paracelsus, who whispered me that wisdom was to be found more in the vagabond bye-ways of life than in the ordered and regulated highways.  That the true knowledge was to be garnered from knocking about with vagrants, gipsies, carriers ... from corners in wayside inns where travellers discoursed....

And there was Boehmen, the inspired German shoemaker, who was visited by an angel, or some sort of divine stranger, and given his first illumination outside his shop ... and later walked a-field and heard what the flowers were saying to each other, seeing through all creation at one glance, crystal-clear.