“No.  It’s not over ten miles.  I’ll walk.”

I was glad to be paid off.  I was missing my books and my leisure, longing for the cool alcoves of books in the university “stack.”

“You understand me, I hope ... business is business and work is work.  I’ve found it doesn’t do to argue ... only stirs up trouble....

“I hope you don’t think all this debating will end after you’re gone?...  Oh, no,—­for the next week or so the boys will continue shooting their mouths off ... the Baptist will fight the Methodist, and both will join against the Seventh Day Adventist ... and the one Catholic will be assailed by all hands....

“Before you came, no one knew what the other fellow believed, and no one cared ... but now you’ve started something.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Bonton.”

“It can’t be helped now ... don’t fail to let me know in what magazines your poems on threshing and the harvest will appear.”

* * * * *

I trudged townward, light-hearted ... a poem began to come to me before I had gone a mile ... at intervals I sat down and wrote a few lines....

That fall the National Magazine printed The Threshers and The Harvest and The Cook-Shack, three poems, the fruit of that work.  All three written on the road as I walked back to town ... and all three didactic and ridiculous in their praise of the worker.

* * * * *

Frank Randall, tinsmith and plumber, who ran his shop on the main street, rented me a back room over his store, for two dollars a week.  It had been occupied by big Sam, the negro shoemaker, and it was neither in order, nor did it smell very sweet.  But I cleaned and aired it, and sprinkled disinfectant about that I had bought at the drug store.

Then I fetched my books down from Langworth’s in a wheelbarrow, and I set them up in several neat rows.

I lay back on my cot and looked at them in satisfaction and happiness.  I had enough for food and lodging for nearly three months, if I cooked for myself.  Two dollars a week for food and two for rent, and I’d do my own washing ... say five a week at the most! that would mean twelve weeks of doing nothing but reading and writing and studying.

The first day of my sojourn over the tinsmith’s shop, Sunday, I drew down from the shelf my Heinrich Heine ... in German ... one of the tasks I set myself, during that three months, was the making an intensive study of just how Heine had “swung” the lyric form to such conciseness, such effectiveness of epigrammatic expression.

I opened the Buch der Lieder at the poem in his preface—­the song of the sphinx in the enchanted wood ... and how it clutched the seeker, the poet, to its monstrous but voluptuous woman’s breasts as it ravished his soul with kisses.  And the nightingale was singing....

  “O, shoene Sphinx, O loese mir
  Das Raetsel, das wunderbare! 
  Ich hab’ darueber nachgedacht
  Schon manche tausand Yahre.”