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THE YOUTH OF
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THE YOUTH OF
JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

Fortune\^ way with the Poet from
Infancy to Manhood

MARCUS DICKEY

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THE YOUTH OF
JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

Fortune's way with the Poet from
Irtfancy to Manhood

MARCUS DICKEY

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS PAINTED
UNDER THE POETS DIRECTION

By WILL VAWTER

AND REPRODUCTIONS OF PHOTOGRAPHS,

DAGUERREOTYPES. LETTERS AND

RARE DOCUMENTS

INDIANAPOLIS

THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY

PUBLISHERS

Printed in the VnUed Statee of America

m*CM or

BRAUNwroirrH a co.

■OOK MANUrAOTURIIIB
•MOOKLVN. N. r.

Turn, Fortune, turn thy wheel.

Turn thy wUd wheel

Through sunshine, storm and cloud;

Smile and we smile.

The lords of many lands;

Frown and we sm^Ie,

The lords of our own hands;

For m>an is man

And master of his fate.

— Alwbsd Tsnktsok.

FOREWORD

WHen Cromwell sat to Sir Peter Leiey, he said, ^ desire
yon will use all your skill to paint my picture truly lite me,
and not flatter me at all; but remark all those rou^messes,
pimples, warts, and everything as you see jdb.^

This famous injunction Biley quoted to a reporter who
sought his opinion on biography. The poet had read it, for
the first time, when a youth, in the preface to a rare and much
loved set of old books entitled British Painters and Sculptors.
To a writer who came to him for a sketch of his life, he
said, '^on't take sides with conflicting opinions about me;
don't strive to write me up or down; tell the facts.** He went
on to talk of Boswell. 'They have called him a conceited
fool," said he^ '%ut he was of as much benefit to literature as
Johnson himself. He put things down as they v^re, and for
once we have the charming chronicle of a life without the
weakness of apology."

To the author of this volume, the poet said: 'There is a
Chemistry in Nature that is making the worst good and the
best better. To this end a biographer may give scars the
treatment distance gives them in the landscape; he may
soften or spiritualize them — but never ignore them." In a
word, the golden rule was this : speak the truth in love.

Evidently the above observations suggest a sympathetic,
lovable book; but it is one thing to receive suggestions, an-
other and altogether different thing to carry them out. The
author does not claim to have done this, but he does claim
while doing his work to have had the poef s ideals uppermost
in mind. By breaking away, to some extent, from '^the dull

THE YOUTH OF
JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS— C(wMntted

Facsihilb Lettbb Fbom Hbabth and

HOMB

Hbadikq of Heabth and HoiiE . .
"That Sign in thb Post Officb*' . .

Her Bbautiful Hand

Whbn the Pobt Was Twbnty-fivb .
Thb Sbcond Lbttbb fboh Lonqfbllow
Hbnby Wadswobth Lonqfbllow . .
John Townsbnd Tbowbbidqb • . .
Anderson Democrat Office . . .
Old Cottage on Bolivar Street . .
Thb Poet at the Age of Twenty-eight
Old Coxtnty Court Housb • • . « .

Facing page 274

« 276

'' 304

^ 306

** 320

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** 341

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THE YOUTH OF
JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

The Youth of
James Whitcomb Riley

CHAPTER I

A GLIMPSE OF THE EARLY DAYS

IT WAS the tide of migration; what the Red Man
called the White Man's Flood — ^youth, commerce
and trade, visions of wealth, the arts, sowing and
reaping, faith, hope and love, following the Great
Western Pioneer, the sun. Rising from the shores of
the British Isles and the continent of Europe, it crossed
the Atlantic and fringed the seaboard of a new world
with cities and farms. It ascended the eastern slopes
of the mountains, poured through the gates of the Blue
Ridge and the AUeghanies, and swept through the
forests and over the prairies of the Ohio Valley.

What was its character? Who were the emigrants?
They were not one people, not a family of single
extraction from one motherland. They were French-
men and Englishmen, Dutch, Irish, and Scotch-
men, descendants of Puritans and cavaliers, gen-
tlemen from Virginia, artisans from Pennsylvania
and students from New England. There were
woodmen, sturdy swains, and delvers with the spade;
pedestrians, riders, and revelers — and felons, not mul-
titudes of them such as the motherland once sent to
Australia, but a sufficient number to be an important

2 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

factor in the structure of states. There were soldiers
ever ready to hurry to the charge, and orators who
swayed the multitude with impassioned speech. There
came also musicians. In the new land as in the
old, the four essentials were food, clothing, shelter and
recreation. Over the mountains "with the cooking
pots and pails'' came the fiddle and banjo. There were
the forefathers of sculptors and painters, and

"Of poets pacing to and fro,
Murmuring their sounding lines" ;

particularly the ancestors of a poet of simple life,
the central figure in the succeeding chapters of this
volume. It was a race of men with their backs turned
upon the sea, "civilization frayed at the edges," a
master historian has said, "taken forward in rough
and ready fashion, with a song and a swagger, by
woodsmen and drovers, with axes and whips and rifles
in their hands." Hundreds among the thousands who
came were disappointed. Many returned, but the large
majority remained, "built cabins, planted crops, culti-
vated farms, founded towns and cities, and established
a new empire."

Of the land to which they came it may be said that
in expanse and grandeur it surpassed all other won-
derlands of the temperate zone. The Forest of Arden
in which the imagination of Shakespeare reveled was
a brushwood in comparison. Such mammoth trees the
eye of man had seldom seen. It was a rich land.
Daniel Boone, looking out over it, was "richer than
the owners of cattle on a thousand hills." But its
wealth could not be measured by the hunter's eye. It
was a primeval region many hundred leagues in cir-
cumference. From east to west it equaled the distance

A GLIMPSE OF THE EARLY DAYS 3

traversed by Stanley in his march to the Mountains of
the Moon. But how great the contrast. The Stanley
region was in the darkest comer of the earth, brood-
ing under the eternal storm-clouds of the equator. The
masses of forest vegetation suggested mystery and awe.
Not so the American woods. As the African explorer
said of them, 'There was poetic seclusion, graceful dis-
order, bits of picturesque skies, and the sun shedding
softened streams of light on scenes of exhaustless
beauty and wonder." The scenes were vocal with the
songs of streams and birds. Breezes whispered their
gentle mysteries to the trees, and mighty winds made
music in the forest like

"The roar of Ocean on his winding shore."

It was a midway region, exempt alike from the se-
verity of the Canadian winters and the enervating
summer heat of the Gulf coast. The kingdom of nature
— ^the seasons, morning, noon, evening, and the silence
of night — surpassed the splendors of the Orient; and
when Indian sununer came to fold the land in sym-
pathetic sleep, there came with it a vision of per-
fection that rivaled dreams of the Golden Age.
"The world of childhood," wrote William Dean
Howells, whose boyhood was a part of it, "the child-
hood of that vanished West, which lay between the
Ohio and the Mississippi, and was, unless memory
abuses my fondness, the happiest land that ever there
was under the sun."

In such a land it was less difficult for men and
women to order their lives on a comprehensive scale,
and they began to do that. Their dreams and deeds,
in part, corresponded to their surroundings. They
loved youth, "They lived freely with powerful unedu-

4 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

cated persons. They loved the earth, the sun and the
animals; despised riches, hated tyrants, and took off
their hats to no man nor any number of men/' They
were transformed by the rough fortunes of the fron-
tier, and in the passing of the years a poet was bom to
celebrate the transformation — Si poet of the people with
poems, said Mark Twain, ''as sweet and genuine as
any that his friends, the birds and bees, make about
his other friends, the woods and flowers."

There was another side to the picture of the West,
the West as seen one lovely April by Charles Dickens,
then a young novelist of thirty, who came down the
Ohio River in a steamboat and hurried through the re-
gion from Cincinnati to Lake Erie, in a stage-coach.
Ohio and Indiana were in the making; Cincinnati,
lying in its amphitheater of hills, commended itself to
the novelist favorably and pleasantly. The way out of
the city led through a beautiful, cultivated country
rich in the promise of an abundant harvest. Soon
however the scene changed. Roadside inns were dull
and silent. There were the primitive worm-fence, the
unseemly sight of squalid huts, wretched cabins,
broken-down wagons, and shambling, low-roofed cow-
sheds. Villagers stared idly at the passengers and
sent up a silly shout when the coach bumped against
the stumps in the street. Loafers lounged around the
country stores, the climate was pernicious and every-
where were signs of ill health and depression.

Beyond were miles upon miles of forest solitudes
"unbroken by any sign of- human life or any trace of
human footsteps" — ^then to come suddenly upon a
clearing with black stumps strewn about the field, to
find settlers burning down the trees, the charred and
blackened giants of the wood lying like so many ''mur-

A GLIMPSE OF THE EARLY DAYS 5

dered creatures" on the earth — it was a scene to excite
the traveler's compassion. His mind reverted to a
former age when mighty forest trees spread their roof
over a land enchanted, an aboriginal age when men
lived pleasantly in blessed ignorance of the destruction
and miseries of the White Man's Flood.

That branch of the tide of migration which Dickens
saw lacked diversity of character. The emigrants
were hollow-cheeked and pale, silent, joyless and un-
social. The women were drowsy; the men seemed
''melancholy ghosts of departed bookkeepers.'' Had
he left the stage-coach and lived for a space with
the settlers, had he gone with them to husking-
bees, barn-raisings and log-rollings, he would have
found robust constitutions and an abundance of joy and
laughter. Among those who lived on com bread, boiled
ham and cabbage, he would have found many who saw
the beauty in the rainbow, in the thunder-storm and
the sunset. And gratitude for literature he would
have found also. John Hay relates that early settlers
in Kentucky saddled their horses and rode from neigh-
boring counties to the principal post-town whenever a
new Waverley novel was expected. Among the old
books scattered here and there in the log cabins of In-
diana and Ohio, Dickens would have found a new one.
Master Humphrey's Clock, which then contained the
story of Little Nell, whose life found an echo in the
brief histories of domestic joys and sorrows of the
frontier. Among those who idolized this heroine of
fiction was Elizabeth Marine, who a few years later
became the mother of a child of song whose mission
was to make glad the people with poetry wrought from
the very things that had filled tiie heart of Dickens
with discontent. As the south wind warms winter

6 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

into sprinsT, as the sun turns the sod to violets, so was
this child of song to transmute the homeliness of those
early days into beauty. Things were unsightly when the
novelist passed. There was to be loveliness and har-
mony when the singer came.

It was a desire of Sir Walter Scott to stand in the
midst of a wild original American forest "with the
idea of hundreds of miles of untrodden forest around
him/' in the vast region stretching westward from the
AUeghanies, for example. Such was the good fortune
of those families who first settled in the woods of Ran-
dolph County, Indiana. Geographically they were in
the very heart of the region. Leading back from those
settlements, as indeed from settlements in every
county, were threads of genealogy, which, if not para-
mount in importance, nevertheless gave color to sub-
sequent life. They played a part in the youth of the
nation. History does not omit them from those days
of hope and discovery. They belong to "the great
story of men." One of those threads led back to Bed-
ford, Pennsylvania, where Reuben Alexander Riley,
father of the poet, was bom in the year 1819.

"I know when my father was born, at any rate,"
once remarked the poet, crowing over the one date in
history he could remember.

"When?" he was asked.

"The year Queen Victoria was bom."

"And what year was that?"

"I don't know."

Reuben Riley was the fifth in a family of fourteen
children. His father, Andrew Riley, and his mother,
Margaret (Sleek) Riley, were bom and reared in
Pennsylvania. "My grandfather Riley," said Reuben,

A GLIMPSE OF THE EARLY DAYS 7

'Vas an Irishman and my grandfather Sleek, a Ger-
man. Both grandmothers were English."

In 1825 Andrew Riley moved with his family to west-
em Ohio, and a few years later across the Indiana line
to a knoll on Stony Creek, Randolph County, where he
built a log cabin near a cluster of giant trees known as
the "sugar orchard." On the way from Pennsylvania,
a distance of four hundred miles, the family experi-
enced many hardships. The father had sold all his
belongings for thirty dollars — except a horse, a "carry-
all" and some clothing. He and the older sons walked
while the mother drove the wagon and cared for the
youngsters. They lived in the open, building camp-fires
in the woods at night. Through the foothills of the
Alleghanies, their food was chiefly chestnuts and gin-
gerbread. In Ohio they had such luxuries as Indian
com, apples and sweet potatoes.

After reaching the woods of Indiana, so tradition
says, "they lived on the fat of the land." There were
grains, venison, squirrels and plenty of vegetables.
There were wild animals to trap and wild turkeys to
shoot; red deer came to Stony Creek daily and black
bear were abundant.

Andrew Riley, certainly, had enough and to spare.
One season when there was a scarcity of grain, desti-
tute Miami Indians came to him and he loaded their
ponies with com. Another year, a stockman insisted
on buying all the com he had at seventy-five cents a
bushel. The offer was refused. "My neighbors need
it," said he, "for seed and bread." He sold to them for
twenty-five cents a bushel.

Such a man was naturally happy in his declining
years, and, above all, at peace with himself and the

8 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

world. A few days before he died, he said, "I have
never intentionally wronged any man. I have not been
vulgar or profane. I have tried to do right. I do not
fear to die."

Another line of genealogy led back to Rockingham,
North Carolina, where Elizabeth (Marine) Riley,
mother of the poet, was bom in 1823. She was the
tenth in a family of eleven children. Her father,
John Marine, and her mother, Fanny (Jones) Marine,
were reared in the South. Her family lineage, on
the paternal side, could be traced back to the
year 1665. Her grandfather Marine was bom in Wales,
being a descendant of the French Huguenots, ''those
refugees that brought art and the refinements of civili-
zation wherever they came.'* His wife was a perse-
cuted Quaker from England. On coming to America
they first settled among the Indians in Maryland, but
later sought the warmer climate of the Carolinas. In
1825, having lost his little fortune by speculating in
weaver-sleighs, John Marine moved with his family to
Indiana, crossing the Ohio River at North Bend.
Among the incidents of the journey was the halt for a
few days on the Ohio, and the joy at finding the new
country all agog over the visit of the Great Lafayette.
For years the story was a favorite in the Marine
family, how the friend of Washington had ascended the
river, and after spending a day with Henry Clay under
the great trees at Ashland, had come to be the guest of
the Queen City, his emotions when he beheld the fron-
tier host on the hills of a city that two score years be-
fore was but a cluster of log huts by the river; how
the Stars and Stripes rippled from steamboats and
buildings, and the applause echoed from both shores
while the venerable hero was conveyed across the river

A GLIMPSE OF THE EARLY DAYS 9

in a barge, how the all^s and commons were blockaded
with ox teams and country wagons, how it had rained
in torrents for a week, and how the artillery splashed
through the muddy streets — a big story it^ was of pa-
triotism in the backwoods, and the Marines were radi-
ant with it when they reached Indiana.

After a transient residence at New Garden and one
or two other points in Wayne County, they settled
permanently on the Mississinewa River in Randolph
County, where they built a cabin on a high bank at a
bend in the river a few miles below Ridgeville. To
the south was a white oak grove, a favorite retreat for
Elizabeth Marine. "She often went there," said her
brother James, *to commune with the big oak." Thus
the moral influence of nature began to sink into her
soul.

The Marines were flat-boat builders, millers, and
verse-makers. About the first thing they did on reach-
ing a new country was to establish a mill site and
write a poetic narrative of their wanderings. "John
Marine," so said his gifted grandson, "wrote his auto-
biography in rhyme. He would sit by the fireplace and
write heavy turbid poetry on scientific and Biblical
subjects. The tendency was to the epic." He laid out
the town of Rockingham on the Mississinewa and ad-
vertised the lots in rhyme. The town, according to an
old record, had so small a growth and so early a death,
that settlers of a later period could not find the faint-
est trace of its location. All that now remains on
the site are a few unmarked graves in the far comer
of a cow pasture, among them the grave of Elizabeth
Marine's mother.

John Marine was not only a boat-builder and rhymer,
but a teacher and preacher as well. He preached to

10 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

neighbors in his cabin on Sunday. He wrote a book
advocating the union of the churdies — a, suicidal thing
to do in his day — which in part is said to have been in
rhyme. The manuscript was kept many years in a
trunk, but "one winter/' to quote his grandson again,
"six mice reduced it to confetti. On the first ballot the
jury was divided, but at last the vote was unanimous
for destruction."

As a preacher John Marine had more than a local
reputation. He and the poet's grandmother, Margaret
Riley, were leaders in the Methodist camp-meetings of
Randolph and Delaware Counties. There were no wan-
dering eyes when they addressed the meetings, particu-
larly when the latter spoke.

"Elizabeth Marine," said William A. Thomburg, an
old resident of Randolph County, "was remarkably
pure-minded. I never saw any one so beautiful in a
calico dress. She belonged to a large family. They
lived in a one-story log house. It had a clay and stick
chimney. She went to school, but her chief delight
was to play along streams and wander in the green
woods. She was always seeing things among the
leaves."

Except that her eyes were blue instead of brown,
Longfellow might have chosen Elizabeth Marine for
his portrait in "Maidenhood." Her nature was poetic.
One of her girlhood friends remembered her ascending
Muncie hill on the Mississinewa to get a view of clear-
ings in the valley, and how happy she was at the sight
of the blue smoke curling up from cabins in the morn-
ing air. The friend added that "she adored her garden
and the cultivation of small fruits. When she stood
in the hollyhocks she seemed to be in a trance." She
loved to listen to the sound of woodchoppers, and the

A GLIMPSE OF THE EARLY DAYS 11

crunch of wagons dragged wearily by oxen along fhe
road. At dusk sweet to her was

'The clinking of bells on the air
Of the cows coming home from the wood."

The scenery that was uninteresting to Dickens was
fair and comely to her. She saw the ''orange in the eve-
ning sky." Bright colored birds were "flying flowers."
Peering through the trees she caught the glimpse of
Pan although it was not her gift to adorn the scene
with the vines of verse as did her illustrious son.

Pomona would have envied this maiden of the Missis-
sinewa her enjojrment of the wild orchards of that
period. To listen to "Johnny Appleseed," the eccen-
tric wanderer who planted them, was one of her
happy opportunities. She remembered his telling of
his first visit to the Indiana forest, how he had brought
a sack of apple seeds on the back of an ox. His narra-
tive pleased her because it was novel. His peculiarities
were captivating — ^like a bird he was, roosting where
night overtook him — always wearing ragged clothes —
never carrying a gun — ^never sleeping in a bed — ^never
having any place he called home, yet always happy,

"While he was walking by day or lying at night in the

forest.
Looking up at the trees, and the constellations beyond
them."

She recalled that he was a Swedenborgian, and how
deeply she was impressed with his belief that "grow-
ing old in Heaven is growing young." James Marine,
her brother, long afterward said that this was his
sister's vision of Heaven as long as she lived.

Among the influences that came through the moun-
tain passes with the tide of migration, was the breath

12 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

of love — ^love, as the poet has said, fresh with the youth
of the world, old and yet ever new, and always beau-
tiful. "We had to reckon with it on all occasions," said
a county pioneer; "it swayed young hearts at picnics
and camp-meetings as the breeze swayed the green
tree-tops." In a settlement on Cabin Creek (to which
point the Marines had come after Elizabeth's mother
had died and the home had been broken up on the
Mississinewa) was a slender young woman twenty
years old, lovely as the maiden of Plymouth, and like
her, too, in that she was familiar with the hum of the
spinning-wheel. Over in the Stony Creek settlement
was a young man twenty-four years old. He was lithe,
straight and tall, had black eyes, black hair and a
radiant face. He was known for his eloquence in de-
bating clubs, had taught school, studied law in a neigh-
boring county-seat, been admitted to the bar, and had
had a limited practice in a prairie village in Iowa.

"Now it happens in this country," said Abraham
Lincoln, "that, for some reason or other, we meet once
every year, somewhere about the Fourth of July.
These Fourth of July gatherings, I suppose, have
their uses." Indeed, they do, and quite the first
of the uses of the Fourth of July gathering in Neeley's
Woods, near the village of Windsor, Randolph County,
1843, was that Reuben A. Riley might meet Elizabeth
Marine and fall a victim to her beauty. It was a day
for family reunions — a barbacue day, the "roast" con-
sisting of several pigs, an ox, and five lambs. Stony
Creek laughed through the wood, and there, too, played
those other streams, "the life-currents that ebb and
flow in human hearts." There was the confusion of
wagons, the "herd of country bo3rs," babies tumbling
on the ground, and men and maidens making merry.

The Poet's Motheb, AnouT IIWO

His First Schoolhouse
The little Dfluie Trot clwelliiig of three rooms

A GLIMPSE OF THE EARLY DAYS 18

As the afternoon wore on, the rounds of pleasure
continued, the last year's leaves were swept from a
spot in the woods, and, to paraphrase Tennyson,

• ''men and maids

Arran^red a country dance, and flew through light
And shadow, while the twanging violin
Struck up with Ycunkee Doodle^ and lofty heech
Made noise with bees and breeze from end to end."

Here Reuben Riley and Elizabeth Marine met for the
first time— and their dancing feet went forward with
the rest. 'It was love at first sight," said James
Marine. "I am an old man now and have seen many
days of pleasure, but none like that one in Neeley's
Woods. I think I never saw my sister dance so
happily.**

As usual, Lincoln, the master interpreter of men
and events, was right. A young lawyer came to that
forest jubilee free as an eagle. He met a young woman
he had not seen before, and left the woods that night
a captive for life. Truly, "these Fourth of July gath-
erings have their uses."

Although the crowd assembled at the behest of Lib*
erty, it did not march in procession with banners. A
few flags hanging from the trees paid tribute to "the
day we celdi>rate." There were no giant fire crackers,
nor Roman candles, no p3rrotechnic display except the
flames from a log-heap and a few shell-bark hickory
fires, which illumined the woods at nightfall. There
were no fairy-balloons — ^but there were fairies, on the
authority of James Marine and his friend William
Thomburg, who remembered that Elizabeth pointed
to them in the flickering shadows above her.

"Love," according to the old saw, "keepeth its cap*
tive awake all night" So Reuben Riley, after losing

14 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

his heart that July day, had his repose sadly disturbed.
There was an Indian pony trail some six miles long
between Stony Creek and Cabin Creek, which he trav-
eled frequently by the light of a lantern. Eagerly he

Followed the pathway that ran through the woods to
the house of Priscilla,"

but unlike John Alden he was not led thither by de-
ceptive fancy. He went always on the errand of love.
Love ''was spinning his life and his fortune'' and the
life and fortune of a son of song. All thought of
returning to the far-away town on the prairies for
the practice of law came to an end. His reflections
fashioned a home in Indiana. February 20, 1844,
he and his sweetheart Elizabeth were married at
Unionport on Cabin Creek — and thus the pony path
was turned into a bridal path.

For a time previous to her marriage, Elizabeth had
lived with her brother at Unionport. "We made them
a pretty wedding," said her sister-in-law. "Her brother
Jonathan and Emily Hunt stood up with them. They
looked nice. Her wedding dress was a pale pink silk.
She wore a long white veil and white kid gloves and
shoes. Her infair dress was gray poplin. She looked
beautiful in her leghorn bonnet the next day when she
rode away on horseback with Reuben through the
woods."

After the honeymoon, which in those days did not
include a trip to the Mediterranean, the young hus-
band brought his bride in July, 1844, to live in Green-
field, a village of three hundred inhabitants, on Brandy-
wine Creek, Hancock County, Indiana. It being the
usual thing to do then, he moved into a log cabin —

A GLIMPSE OF THE EARLY DAYS 15

'^pon the main street and the main highway
From East to West — ^historic in its day —
Known as the National Road/'

Greenfield was fifteen years old. Like the settle-
ments in Ri^ndolph County, it was neighbor to the
primeval forest. That forest had ''multiplicity and
richness of tinting/' and there was no "sad poverty of
variety in species" among the trees. "The county
is heavily timbered/' said an early record, "as largely
covered with beech, sugar maple, oak, ash, elm, walnut,
buckeye, and hickory as any county in the State/' A
report of a Mass Convention refers to settlers "emerg-
ing from the beech woods around our peaceful village/'
The humorist smiles at the size of that Mass Conven-
tion. It was held in a courtroom which was then the
upper floor of a log house about twenty feet long.

The population was sparse. There were tangled
solitudes in the county that challenged the courage of
the bravest immigrant. Roads were few and winding.
Settlers consumed days in going to mill, although one
is inclined to believe they did other things on the
way, for one settler is said to have returned in his
ox-cart with "four deer, a half dozen fox and wolf
skins, and seven wild turkeys." Less than two score
years before Reuben Rilqr came to Greenfield, the
Delaware Indians were tramping up and down Brandy-
wine, to and from their hunting grounds, then located
in the wilderness, now known as Shelby and Bartholo-
mew Counties. So far as the records show there was
no poet in the tribe who

"Heard the songs divine,
Up and down old Brandywine/'

The young couple promptly todc a promineiit

16 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

place in the life of the community; in its labors and
its pleasures. Soon after their coming, the first
newspaper was printed, the Greenfield Reveille, and
the husband announced himself in its business directory
as "Attorney at Law, Office at my residence." He was a
favorite from the first, and there was a demand for his
eloquence on public occasions. He took a lively interest
in the national campaign, becoming a champion of

'Tolk and Annexation

against

The Bank and High Taxation."

'His bride Elizabeth also was a favorite* She
was the joy of the neighborhood, and there was
a melody in her voice on moonlit evenings that
tiiose who heard could not forget. On public occa-
sions she was remembered for "the bloom and grace
of womanhood.'' Old residents recalled how beautiful
she looked among friends on the front porch of the old
National Hotel. They remembered her charming man-
ners and how lovingly she waved her hand to her hus-
band in a procession that passed by. She contributed
verse to the weekly Reveille and later to the Greenfield
Spectator and other county papers, among them The
Family Friend and the American Patriot What she
wrote did not pass muster, but there was a poetic
impulse in the heart, none the less. She was a link in
the Marine genealogy, and as destiny designed,, the
last in that succession of verse-makers, who, for a
century or more, in their humble way, had foretold
the coming of a poet, whose pen would one day trans-
figure the simple beauty of simple things — and therein
make—

A GLIMPSE OF THE EARLY DAYS 17

''Rude popular traditions and old tales
Shine as immortal poems/'

Once for all it may be said that Greenfield was no
mean village. Notwithstanding the neighboring Black
Swamp and the marsh lands on Brandywine, it had a
charmingly romantic setting. Locust trees and sugar
maple saplings stood irregularly along the sidewalks.
Beech, ash and walnut, left standing when the ground
was cleared, gave variety and shade to backyards and
byways. The dwellings were cabins and frame cot-
tages. The business rooms were for the most part
one-story buildings, though an occasional two-story
one gave promise of more pretentious blocks in days
to come.

As Reuben and Elizabeth Riley took their place in the
community, so Greenfield took its place in ''the great
psalm of the republic.'' It was the gathering place for
life currents from southern climes, and from tiie farm-
lands and cities of the East. There were students with
a record of things done under the elms at Yale, and
neighbor to these, now and then, a squire of birth and
distinction, who pointed with pride to his huge Carolina
wagon and his four-horse team, which he had driven
from his plantation on the Great Pedee. This blending
of the East and South meant in the next generation "a
peculiar people" — a population untrammelled by the
artifice of fashion and f ormality* It meant independ-
ence and simplicity of character. An acre of earth
near Greenfield dilated with "the grandeur and life of
the universe," as did an acre in the vicinity of Boston
or Savannah. There was a school of experience,
ample opportunity for diversity of endeavor. There
were love, courtship and marriage, and devotion to
home and country. The region grew robust men, and,

18 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

none tiie less, mothers of large families, whose opinions
on men and affairs compared favorably with the judg-
ments of their husbands. There was a native fresh-
ness that made even the illiterate interesting. Village
statesmen talked profoundly of their country's possi-
bilities and perils, and hunters and woodmen were not
strangers to books or the calls of culture.

"We had our dreary days/' remarked an early set-
tler, "but were not cast down. We were up with the
lark and down with rheumatism but seldom beyond the
reach of the lark's song." Nature nourished the poetic
impulse, whatever the station in life, state of health,
or degree of intelligence.

A peaceful village surrounded by beech woods with
a little "willow brook of rhymes" flowing through it,
the beech woods a part of a primeval forest diversified
with neighborhoods of men, women and children
— all in all, as happy a land and time for the birth of
a poet as "ever there was under the sun.'

CHAPTER n

THE RHYME OF CHn4DH00D

I HAVE no doubt that somewhere in the wilds of
this western land the wind, whispering through
the chinks of some log cabin, is ruflSing the curls
upon the brow of a future son of fame."

Such were the words of an Indiana orator in a speech
delivered in the forties of the last century. The proph-
ecy was not made in vain. Several sons of fame were
bom in that decade, but the birth of one particularly
concerns these pages. One day in October, 1849, a
fortnight after that birth, Fortune singled out a run-
away boy to find the cradle of future greatness. Hurry-
ing away from discontentment at his home in Indian-
apolis, the boy ran eastward along the old Plank
Road. It was Sunday morning. The woods were
yellowing and orchard boughs were bending with
ripened fruit. When he grew hungry he filled his linen
coat pockets with apples. Occasionally a farm wagon
going to or from church gave him a lift and for a time
he was accompanied by a stranger who listened suspi-
ciously to the tale of his woes.

The forenoon was long, the afternoon longer, but just
as the sun was sinking behind the notorious Black
Swamp the toll-gate burst upon the runaway's tired
vision, and a few moments later he saw in the deepen-
ing twilight the village of Greenfield, the end of his
day's flight. At the edge of town he fell in with
a boy who had been driving cows to pasture. The

20 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

lad directed him to the home of one Reuben A. Riley —
a young lawyer, thirty years of age, and a leading citi-
s^n of the little counly-seat.

"There the lawyer lives/' said the boy as they entered
Main Street, pointing to a little, unpainted, half-frame,
half -log house in the southeast corner of its lot. At the
gate the boys parted and soon a timid knock brought the
lawyer to the door — and the runaway stood speechless
in the presence of his brother. Not meeting in the stem
dark eye of the lawyer the welcome he hoped for, the
young brother covered his face with his hands and sat
down on the door-step. At the same moment he heard
the rustle of a dress and the voice of a gentle wife
and mother. She stood for an instant, "saintly and
sad as the twilight,'' and then led the boy through
the front room to the kitchen — the frame structure at
the rear of the cabin.

Now that the runaway is in the arms of the mother,
it is good to listen to his story in his own words —
as it was told half a century later. "Within her
arms," said he, "I had the feeling of utter security.
She combed my hair and seated me on her knee. As
the story of my running away proceeded, I looked up
and there inside the kitchen door stood the swarthy
form of the lawyer, his arms folded and his eyes bent
severely upon us. Lifting her soft blue-gray eyes to
his, with tears shining on their fringes like dew on
the grass, she pled my cause. Tiet him stay and be a
companion to our children,' said she. At this, the black
eyes softened. Laying his hand on my head and look-
ing longingly into her face, he said. There, Lizzie, it is
settled ; he can stay ; I will inform the folks to-morrow/

"Then came supper — and such a supper the Prodigal
Son never feasted upon. Everything — ^pie, cake, pre-

THE RHYME OF CHILDHOOD 21

serves, milk and bread white as snow — and all the
time the mother standing behind my chair, filling my
plate as often as I could clear it. After supper we went
to the front room. 1 have something pretty to show
you/ she said ; 'something you have never seen.' Lead-
ing me to an old-fashioned box cradle, near the window
where the 'Queen of the Prairie' shed its fragrance on
the night breeze, she gently lifted a snowy little cover
and showed me the sleeping face of a babe. I stooped
and kissed its dainty lips — and thus I entered a Child-
World."
The baby had been bom Sunday morning, October
^ 7^ 1^9i and a week later christened James Whitcoml
fiiley in response to the father's admiration for Gov-
ernor James Whitcomb of Indiana. ''At no period in the
' . history of the State,'' said the Governor, in his Thanks-
\ giving message, "has the bounty of God in the control
of the seasons been so signally manifested towards us
as during the year now drawing to a close." He was
thinking of material blessings, but Heaven was not
unmindful of the new birth of poeoy in the box cradle
at Greenfield.

True to the instincts of child-nature, the boy started
from his cradle on a voyage of discovery. "The first
thing I remember," said Riley, "was my father's riding
up to the woodhouse door witii a deer hanging from the
pommel of his saddle; and about the second thing I
remember was the bugler who galloped west on the
National Road with news of the death of President
Taylor." Before he could walk the Riley child learned
that his by-name was "Bud," and that he had been thus
lovingly dUistinguished by his Uncle Mart, Martin Whit-
ten Riley, the runaway who had discovered him in the
box cradle. The uncle, a few years "Bud's" senior, was

22 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

himself a youth of "poetic symptoms," and, next to
the mother, had the greatest influence on her boy
in that morning of childish glee. He could
invent stories for boys almost as interesting as
those he remembered from books. He built a playhouse
for the children in the apple trees, and sometimes when
summer days were hot and long he climbed to it him-
self "to moon over a novel" or to ease his heart of
'Tiopeless verse." In springtime, when the hired hand
went to the country to plant and plow com, he took
his place in the yard and garden. He pruned the apple
trees, and it was often his fortune to sniff "alluring
whiffs of the dear old-fashioned dinners the children
loved." He was also the hired girl when the mother
had more than she could do, as was often the case. At
meal-time he seated

"The garland of glad faces Tound the board —
Each member of the family restored
To his or her place, with an extra chair"

for the farmer the father brought in from the street, or
a state politician who came from afar on the long high-
way for a conference with the lawyer at the noon hour.
Uncle Mart inspired the little "Bud" with his first
ambition, the desire to be a baker, and at divers times
took the place of the mother or the hired girl when
they were too busy to give lessons in cooking. "Bud"
spent much of the time in the kitchen, rolling dough
and making pies, which at first were little more than
fragments. After a while he improved so that he
"could build pies of legitimate size. My joy" (to quote
from his own memory of them) "was complete when
I could fashion a custard pie — and then came the feat,
worthy of a slight-of-hand performer, of getting it

THE RHYME OF CHILDHOOD 28

into the oven without spilling/' His ambition was not
a childish whim. For several years he felt a twinge of
disappointment that he had not realized it. He reaUy
thought he would make a success as a baker.

The kitchen being a world far too small for a boy of
''BudV possibilities, the circle of his discoveries soon
extended to the garden and stable lot ; in short, he began
to distinguish himself by an eminent degree of curios-
ity. "Then/* as he observed when older, "was the flood-
tide of interrogation points. I could ask more questions
than grandfather in Paradise could answer in a year"
— ^why bears steal pigs from the pen — ^why they carry
bee gums on their arms — ^where go the wagons on the
Plank Road — ^what the leaves say when they whisper —
why the grass is green — why the rain drools down the
window-pane — ^why the moon is low and the stars are
high — ^never an end of questions — and never an end of
questing. One day the mother discovered that "Bud"
was a poet, when he came running from the yard, all in
a flutter, with a story of an apple shower. "Uncle
held the basket," he prattled,

"Old Aunt Fanny wuz shaking 'em down.
And Johnny and Jimmy wuz picking 'em up."

The lines lacked the touch of the trained lyrist, but as
Uncle Mart said, "they tinkled." The hint of a tune-
ful future may be taken for what it is worth, but there
is testimony to the effect that the poetic impulse dawned
in the Riley heart very early. He did not, like Bryant,
"contribute verse to the county paper before he was
ten years old," but he was a poet in feeling before
that date. One spring morning Uncle Mart led him
away for a whole-day ramble up a stream that rose in
the hills and came prattling through the village — "the

24 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

little willowy Branch of rhymes/' it was, '*that split
the town'' and mingled its current

'With the limpid, laughing waters
Of the Classic Brandywine."

As Riley remembered, he was about six or seven
years old. For him it was a day of blooming cheeks
and open brow — a day of discovery. He recalled that
Uncle Mart talked of the stream and the thick woods as
a stage. He and ''Bud" were stage-hands lifting cur-
tains for views of scenery. "And not a great while
after/' said Riley, recalling the enchantment of that
childish hour, ''I learned that the world is a stage and
that Fortune is the stage-hand that lifts the curtain."
Back of Uncle Mart and ''Bud" was a fairy impulse
from the mother. The uncle credits her with "build-
ing and formulating the happiest programs that were
ever placed upon the boards of her home stage." The
ramble along the Branch was the beginning of a period
that sparkled with joy akin to that of the dancing
stream. Often "Bud" was drawn to its banks to listen
to its limpid waters. Its pebbles, glittering in
the ripples, looked up to him "like the eyes of
love." They did not kindle the poetic impulse in
him as it was kindled a few years later by Tharpe's
Pond, a "little mirror of the sky" in the woods, but
there were "poetic symptoms" unmistakably. While
he sought the play-place of his childhood. Nature
planted in his heart the germs of "The Brook-Song," a
lilting melody that rivals the music of the stream that
inspired it. It was no fleeting influence that sparkled
in his vision

'Till the gurgle and refrain
Of its music in his brain
Wrought a happiness as keen to him as pain."

THE RHYME OF CHILDHOOD 25

A plajonate of his age (now Mrs. Rose Mitchell
Gregg) gives a village portrait of the Riley boy, such
a picture as a friend once gave of Tennyson paddling
in the sandy shallows of Jus boyhood stream. ''I saw
Riley once/' she writes, "when he was about eight
years old, down in our neighborhood wading in the
Branch with his trousers rolled up above his knees.
Holding them high as he could with his hands, he was
kicking the water and looking for the deep places. He
wore a little blue roundabout and a soft, white felt hat
without band or lining. His hair was very light and cut
short, his eyes big and blue and his face freckled. He
was a slight little fellow, but keen and alert. I won-
dered why he had wandered so far from home. Wad-
ing in the Branch was a joyous pastime for Greenfield
children.'' Smiling back on the incident Riley gave it
the flavor of a rhyme^

''My hair was just white as a dandelion ball.
My face f redded worse than an old kitchen wall.''

His love of the brook reveals at that very early date
what became for him a primary motive of life:
passion for the beautiful — ttisA something that sends
children to the fields for flowers, the sense that delights
in singing birds, the colors of sunset, and the rustle of
leaves in October woods. "I remember," said Riley,
"when that passion became a controlling influence, how
it incited me to an act that does not now flame with
the color it had then. I wanted a pair of boots with red
tops. I slipped away from home to a shoe store where
my father bought on credit. After looking in vain for
them I selected a pair with green tops and told the
clerk to charge them. At home I stole upstairs to my
bedroom and there wore them all alone with great joy.

26 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

I strode around the room proud as a knight with a spur
on his heel. When any one came up the stairway I
quickly pulled them off and hid them under the feather
bed. Thus I enjoyed them for two weeks before my
purchase was discovered. My father insisted on re-
turning them, but my mother's love prevailed, and after
that I was permitted to wear them in public."

A similar instance was Riley's purchase of a cake
of toilet soap with pennies he had saved for the pur-
pose. "I was probably eight years old," said he. "I
wanted to pace back and forth in front of the show
case — ^just look at it for a while before I bought. When
a clerk came toward me I looked at something else till
he gave attention to another customer. For weeks
after I bought it I kept the cake in my pocket — ^just
pleased to my finger-tips with its transparent beauty.
I shall not grow old so long as I enjoy a show case of
toilet soap."

As runs the proverb, God oft hath a large share in a
little house. In the present history, His share is in the
log cabin that stood at the side of the old National Road
in Greenfield. In the human as well as the divine order
of things, the day arrived for it to be torn down — ^the
family having moved to a new homestead — and Uncle
Mart and the children came with the hired man to that
end. Having lived in it for a decade, the mother was
pensive, but the children were altogether happy.

In that cabin home originated an influence that
was as far-reaching as it was beautiful — ^the faith
in fairies. Night after night Uncle Mart had tucked
little ''Bud" in his trundle bed and lulled him to sleep
with fairy tales. That was the beginrUng. The faith
in fairies never died. When "Bud" became a man,
it was modified, but never forsaken. "Earth out-

THE RHYME OF CHILDHOOD 27

grows the mystic fancies/' sang Mrs. Browning. As
Riley saw it, the outgrowth was a fatal day for the
earth. He held with Schiller and Wordsworth that in
the overthrow of mythology the world had lost more
than it had gained. As the image-making power in the
mind of the race was busy with the marvelous things
of old, so should it be busy with the marvelous things
of now. Hence the Arabian Nights remained his
favorite book. To the last, he held unalterably to the
sentiment of the ''Natural Educationists/' that there
are fairies in the hearts of all good and great people —
''that fairies whisper to us to do good deeds — ^that
fairies are the creative power which has caused the
building of great structures, the painting of great pic-
tures, the composition of great music, and the produc-
tion of great poems." His lead pencil, a candlestick,
wicker baskets and other objects about the room were
fairies in disguise. Every thought that kindled his
heart into rapture came to him on fairy wings from
the shores of mystery, and whenever anything he did
fell below the plane of fairy endeavor, "was reduced,''
as he said, "by the tyranny of conditions to the level of
a humdrum existence," he was unhappy. The fairies
were absent The fire in his heart was low. like
Lowell, he mourned the loss of Aladdin's lamp and the
beautiful castles in Spain. But this was never so when
he could maintain a fairy interest in his work. When-
ever his faculties were quickened to the fervor he ex-
perienced in childhood, when visions of pure joy rav-
ished his heart, his fevered sight was cooled. Then
all was love— r

"The chords of life in utmost tension
With the fervor of invention/'

28 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

The Marines traced a line of genealogy back to de-
scendants of the Celts in Wales, the people, said by
some authorities, to have had the most poetic child-
hood of all the races. Who knows? Perhaps Riley's
adorable faith in fairies, and his mother's before him,
were after all the faith of the little people that once
lived in the obscure islands and peninsulas of western
Europe. Who knows? His charming simplicity, his
delicacy of feeling, and his desire to penetrate the un-
known may have had a Celtic origin, may have been
traceable to ''the race that above all others was fitted
for family life and fireside joys." It is certainly a
Celtic picture we have of Riley as a child in the log
cottage. In the cabin, after twilight, while the apples
sputtered on the hearth and the light from the fireplace
flickered on the walls, stories reeled from Uncle Mart's
fancy as brightly as the flames laughed up the chim-
ney ; and best of all, the mother approved the harmless
fictions and laughed heartily with the flames and the
children. "Bud" once noted the absence of katydids
and crickets — could not understand it. They were
the fairies of summer-time, the mother had explained —

"Only in the winter-time
Did they ever stop.
In the chip-and-splinter-time

When the backlogs pop."

As the cabin walls were lowered, other incidents were
recalled. The children remembered the jolly winters,
and particularly the coldest night of the year when the
mother held the lamp and little "Bud" a candle, while
they chinked the cracks where the wind blew through
the floor. And just outside the front door, like a senti-
nel, the old Snow-Man had stood for weeks in "lordly

THE RHYME OF CHILDHOOD 29

grandeur/' — ^the masterpiece that had surpassed the art
of classic Greece. Uncle Mart was reminded of shelter
from the rain. He distinctly remembered the ''rever-
ential shade" on the mother's face when listening to
distant thunder, and her smile of gratitude when she
heard the refrain of the rain on the roof. The mother
recalled a rainy day when the father was away and
the other children had gone a^visiting, how little "Bud''
in a state of breathless anticipation, stood by the win-
dow, marking the teams as they approached and van-
ished on the National Road :

''And there was the cabin window--^
Tinkle, and drip, and drip!
The rain above, and a mother's love.
And God's companionship I"

All in all, winter and summer, the log cottage was a
thing of blessed memory. The poet was bom there
who, when grown, was to save from the ruins a picture
of its simplicity and beauty — ^the young mother tiironed
in her rocking-chair with a work-basket on the floor,
the laughter and call of the children across the way,
the summer wind luring the fragrance of roses from
her window, the while her dreamy hoy, lying near her,
face downward, was bending

"above a book
Of pictures, with a rapt ecstatic look —
Even as the mother's, by the self-same spell^
Was lifted with a light ineffable^
As though her senses caught no mortol cry.
But heard, instead, some poem going by."

One autumn the log cabin had received a coat of
weather-boarding, but the exact year is indefinite, some
claiming it was the year the poet was bom, others the
year following. Even the poet's father, who drew a

30 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

sketch of the cottage in his old age, was not sufficiently
definite on the point to be historic. But all agree that
the young married couple, on coming from the Ran-
dolph County woods, to live in Greenfield, occupied the
cabin. All agree that the poet was bom there, and
that it stood snugly at the comer of the lot in the shade
of trees that grew on the edge of the street.

Prior to the birth of his famous son, Reuben A. Riley
had served one term in the state legislature with credit
to himself and his constituency. There he had met
Governor James Whitcomb, whom to meet was to honor
and love. A few years later he zealously discharged the
duties of county prosecuting attorney. He took great
interest in politics, and on several occasions distin-
guished himself for his eloquent defense of freedom. He
was a leader in the Democratic party of Indiana and
so remained till the Fremont campaign when he with
Oliver P. Morton and others espoused the cause of the
Republican party. In those stormy years he was in
the full strength of his young manhood. Republican
leaders, Morton among them, placed a high estimate
on his services ''in moulding the sentiments of the
young men of the State," who later responded to the
call of President Lincoln. "In the political campaigns
from 1852 to I860," to quote from a political opponent,
"there was too orator more in demand than Reuben A.
Riley, or one who more uniformly satisfied the de-
mand. He expounded the principles of the new parly
as did no other orator in Indiana. His joint debates
were the talk of campaigns. Men referred to his
speeches as finished orations."

All the while he was succeeding in the practice of
the law. His public services brought htm clients,
brought him financial auccess. Prosperity came down

THE RHYME OF CHILDHOOD 31

the National Road and tipped the horn of plenty at his
door, and that meant the means for a larger Riley
homestead,

*The simple, new frame house — eight rooms in all —
Set just one side the center of the small
But very hopeful Indiana town/'

While the father was absent campaigning, the mother
and children at home worked with Mother Nature.
They had a grape-arbor built like a covered bridge over
the pathway to the garden. A row of currant bushes
grew near. Bees murmured in hives at the side of the
lot. lilacs and flowering vines grew lavishly in the
front yard. Apple trees stood here and there between
the street and the garden, and

''Under the spacious shade of these, the eyes
Of swinging children saw the soft-changing skies."

In that family of the Long Ago, were two brothers
and two sisters— each, in the gracious afterwhiles,
happily recalled by the gifted brother in the Child^
World. A third sister, Martha Celestia Riley, bom
February 21, 1847, died in childhood. Oldest of the
brothers was John Andrew Riley, bom December 11,
1844. He was the grave leader among them. He had
a quick observant eye and a keen retentive memory.
Although inclined to serious duties, he nevertheless
could forget the gravity of life and kindle fires
of delight. For a season he would make tame
incidents sparkle with lively mirth, and then (the chil-
dren could never just quite tell why) there almost in-
variably followed an interval of seeming r^norse that
made him undesirable company. Nevertheless he was
loved for his love of others :

32 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

"So do I think of you alway,

Brother of mine, as the tree, —
Giving the ripest wealth of your love
To the world as well as me."

The youngest brother, Humboldt Alexander Riley,
was bom October 15, 1858. He was specially remem-
bered for his insistence on truth in his elders. They
recalled his peach-bloom complexion and particularly
his love of father and mother. Freaks of temper were
yoked in him to uncommon aspirations and i^ections.
He was the lorn child,

"Whose yearnings, aches and stings
Over poor little tilings"

were as poignant and pitiful as the sorrow of the family
over his death in early manhood.

The second daughter, Elva May Riley, bom Janu-
ary 14, 1856, was the "little lady" with golden curls.
She had the blue of the skies in her eyes. She never
romped up and down stairs. She was

'*thoughtf ul every way
Of others first — ^The kind of a child at play
That *gave up,' for the rest, the ripest pear
Or peach or api^e in the garden there."

The third and youngest daughter, Mary Elizabeth
Riley, the only member of the family living at the time
these words are written, was bom October 27, 1864.
With a touch of fancy (in the child book) her eminent
brother recalled a littie girl with a "velvet lisp on
elfin lips" —

"Though what her lips missed, her dark eyes could say
With looks that made her meaning clear as day."

As she grew to womanhood, she manifested many of

THE RHYME OF CHILDHOOD 33

his characteristics, his subtle recognition of and affec-
tion for the fairy wonderland of days gone by, love
of nature, and the harmless eccentricities of human
kind.

It may seem to some that the Riley lad neglected the
schoolroom, and in one sense he did. ''Omit the school-
room from my history entirely/' he once said, "and the
record of my career would not be seriously affected."
The remark was not made in criticism of the public
school, but raj^er to show that he had not been edu-
cated in the conventional manner. In ways innumer-
able, before he entered the schoolhouse, he was getting
an education. He was taught to read at home. From the
very first he seems to have practised "the art of think-
ing, 4he art of using his mind.'' His little system of
opinions was not faultless, but he dared to uphold it.
He strove for the useful side of things and was
just as vigorous in contending against what he thought
was useless. He compassed the First Reader while
other children struggled with its opening pages. In a
few days he had reached the end of the book — ^the lesson
in which Willy, Katy, Carry and their mother go to the
seaside. The children were digging in the sand with
wooden spades, when they threw them down to look at
a ship sailing by. Soon the ship will be out of sight,
according to the lesson, and the children will go home.
"They will do nothing of the sort," said Riley, recall-
ing his youthful dream ; "they will sail with the ship
to foreign lands for tea, sugar, pineapples and cocoa-
nuts. The wind will transport them to far-away gar-
dens of happiness, at least it did me, and I bdieve all
children will be so transported if parents would begin
aright to develop in them the imaginative faculty. Of
course children do not have the poetic vision Long-

84 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

fellow bad when he lay down and listened to the sound
of the waves, but they do have in their little hearts a
picture of

'Spanish sailors with bearded lips
And the beauty and mystery of the ships.
And the magic of the sea/ '*

The reason for "Bud's" special interest in the sea-
side was this. He had been taught his letters and
Primer by his mother and Uncle Mart, but the art of
comprehending what he read was chiefly taught him by
a careless-haired boy, Almon Keefer, whose "interest-
ing and original ways with children," said Riley,
"fairly ignite the eye of memory with rapture/' Al-
mon had an open, honest countenance and a joyous in-
terest in nature but his chief merit, as far as the Riley
nursery was concerned, was his interest in books, and
his skill in reading aloud to children. One of the books
he read was Tales of the Ocean, an old book of stories,
in character much like Tales of the Wayside Inn.
Of the early books it was quite near if not the first of
the list.

"Its back was gone,
But its vitality went bravely on
With its delicious tales of land and sea."

When therefore "Bud" was sent to school, it was
natural that he should protest against the foolish
repetitions in the First Reader and hurry on through
it to kernels of interest. He was a little rebel at the
end of the second lesson :

"Is it an ax?
It is an ax.
It is my ax.
Is it by me?
My ax is by me.
So it is/'

Loa Cabin oh the National Road Where the Toet Was Born

Rii.RT Homestead in Greenfield, :

THE RHYME OF -CHILDHOOD 85

"How criminal/' said Riley, commentinsr on the
schoolboy experience, 'to cramp the imagination of a
child in a barren back-lot like that when a world of
ships and singing birds and meadow flelda may be had
for the asking. The secret of thQ whole matter is this,
whether it be the lesson for the child or the book for
the man — it must he interesting." A vital opinion,
paralleled by the observation of Herbert Spencer, that
too often our system of educatiooi drags the child cmay
from the facts in which it is interested. "Bud" Riley
was Spencer's self-taught London gamin gathering out-
of -school wisdom for himself.

When Riley became associate editor of a county
paper, he reiterated his protest in a half-column, 'To
Parents and Preceptors":

*'We will shortly issue/' he wrote in humorous vein
in the first paragraph, "a little educational work, which
we design shall take the place of McGufFey's First
Reader. We have nothing against McGufFey, but we
love the institutions of our country, moral and educa-
tional, and by the publication of the little volume we
are at present compiling, we confidently expect to meet
a long-felt want of our public schools, and by its pres-
entation to our bright-eyed little friend, 'the school-
boy, with shining morning face, creeping like a snail,
unwillingly to school,' we expect to take the initial step
toward a general revolution of the educational system
as it stands to-day/'

Save for his first school Riley seldom recalled his
school-days pleasantly. "My first teacher," said he,
"Mrs. Frances Neill, was a little, old, rosy, rolly-poly
woman — ^looking as though she might have just come
rolling out of a fairy story, so lovable she was and so
jolly and so amiable. Her school was kept in a little old

86 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

one-story dwelling of three rooms, and — ^like a bracket
on the wall — a little porch in the rear, which was part
of the playground of her 'scholars,' — ^for in those days
pupils were very affectionately called 'scholars/ Her
very youthful school was composed of possibly twelve
or fifteen boys and girls. I remember particularly the
lame boy, who always had the first ride in the swing
in the locust tree at 'recess/

*'Thi8 first teacher was a mother, too, to all her
'scholars/ When drowsy they were often carried to an
inner room — a sitting-room — ^where many times I was
taken with a pair of little chaps and laid to slumber
on a little made-down pallet on the floor. She would
ofttimes take three or four of us together; and I can
recall how my playmate and I, having been admonished
into silence, grew deeply interested in looking at her
husband, a spare old blind man sitting always by the
window, which had its shade drawn down. After a
while we became accustomed to the idea, and when our
awe had subsided we used to sit in a little sewing chair
and laugh and talk in whispers and give imitations of
the little old man at the window.''

Riley recalled that Mrs. Neill wore a white cap with
ribbands — and that she also wore a mole on her face
"right where Abraham Lincoln wore his, and that it
had eye-winkers in it, for when she kissed him they
tickled his nose." Occasionally a large boy came up
from town and during recess beat a tenor drum to drive
the mice away, but the "scholars" never saw any mice.
When a boy was guilty of swearing Mrs. Neill
wrapped a rag round a pen holder, dipped it
in ashes and cleansed his mouth. If he had
kicked another boy she whipped him on the foot.
Her whippings were so softly administered that the

THE RHYME OF CHILDHOOD 87

"scholars" rather enjoyed them, particularly the sequel,
when she led the penitent to a little Dame Trot
kitchen and gave him a piece of fried chicken, or a big
slice of white bread buttered with jam or jelly. Wh«i
the time came to call the children to their books, she
tied a yellow bandana to a switch and cheerily waved
it at the door. Occasionally one ''scholar'' (the reader
infers his name) came tardily from the yard wearily
repeating, "By Double, it's Books! By Double, it's
Books !" The outside of the schoolhouse was his fav-
orite side ; he preferred to climb the apple trees in the
schoolhouse lot. There was a Harvest tree at home,
a few doors away, on which the apples "fairly hurried
ripe for him." As he happily said, '*they dropped to
meet me half-way up the tree." The school yard was
the place for happiness:

"Best, I guess,
Was the old 'Recess' — •
No tedious lesson nor irksome rule-
When the whole round World was as sweet to me
As the big ripe apple I brought to School."

The little school world was not unlike other worlds
of its kind except, perhaps, that it had a larger meas-
ure of freedom. As to signs in it of future greatness,
there was none. "The Big Tree sprout," a wit lat-
terly observed, "was not bigger than any other sprouts.
It was the ordinary thing; it made no show; it did not
suggest a future son of fame." Though small, the
world was nevertheless big enough to grow a large
tree of gratitude. Like the log cabin in which the Ril^
child was bom, the little schoolroom was a thing of
blessed memory. The "scholar" always remembered
his first teacher as "a very dear old woman, so old
she was," he said, "that she died one afternoon — just

88 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

lilie falling asleep. She was so tired, so worn and old.
Who knows ?" he asked, when age approached his own
footsteps. "She may be rested now. Somewhere she
may be waiting for all the little boys and girls she
loved to come romping in again.''

Usually, when prompted to write, Riley looked back-
ward for material. The pioneer past was a rich land-
scape for him. It was beautifully blended with the
hope of the future. The Long Ago was one with the
golden meadow of the Great To Be. He would And a
rustic frame on the walls of memory and make a pic-
ture for it that sometimes surpassed the art of the
painter. Such a picture is the popular poem, "Out to
Old Aunt Mary's." Fortune made the frame for it
one summer in his childhood days. On condition that
they were good school children, the mother had prom-
ised "Bud" and his elder brother, John, a holiday with
relatives a few miles away on Sugar Creek, and then a
week's visit with uncles and aunts some fifty miles dis-
tant in Morgan County. Passing the toll-gate with its
well-sweep pole, the boys began to realize their dream
in the sunshine of the old National Road, the long high-
way that was lost somewhere in the wilderness of the
West. Near Sugar Creek they left the highway for a
winding road past fields and clearings in the back-
woods. The elder brother often recalled the welcome
they received from a family of children who came
romping through the bam lot to the end of the long
lane, up which he and "Bud" hurried on the wings of
joy. As the poetic brother remembered it,

"They pattered along in the dust of the lane.
As light as the tips of the drops of the rain."

Riley gives briefly his own account of the visit to

THE RHYME OF CHILDHOOD 39

Mors:an County. 'In a vague way/' said he, seeking a
tangible basis for the poem, *'I had in mind a visit to
Mooresville and Martinsville, when Cousin Rufus
(Judge William R. Hough of Greenfield) and my
mother drove there with my brother and me and my
sister Elva, then a child in her mother's arms. My
brother and I sat on a seat that unfolded from the
dashboard in the manner of old-fashioned vehicles of
the time. It was a joyous journey, for Cousin Rufus
was the joUiest, cheeriest young man that ever lived
and there was always a song on his lips. We drove
from Greenfield to Indianapolis, where we stopped for
a midday meal. At Mooresville we visited Uncle James
and Aunt Ann Marine, and at Martinsville, Uncle
Charles and Aunt Hester Marine." At both places,
''Bud's'' keen appetite was satisfied with bountiful old-
fashioned dinners— coffee so hot it spangled his eyes
with tears, honey in the comb, quince "preserves,"
juicy pies, and jdly and jam and marmalade.

There were several other visits, so that the poem is
truly a composite one. There was no particular Aunt
Mary, but the little journey to Sugar Creek and the
longer one to Morgan County formed the rustic frame
for the picture. "The simple, child-felt joy of those
visits," to quote Riley^s words, "was as warm in my
memory when I wrote the poem as when a boy I jogged
back on the dusty road to Greenfield."

Citizens of Greenfield maintained what was com-
monly termed a Select School supported by subscrip-
tion, a spring and sunmier term of twelve weeks,
"chiefly," said an old resident, "for the purpose of
keeping idle children off the streets." "It is desir-
able," said the school notice, "that all scholars com-
mence with the school, as it will be to their material

40 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

advantage, as well as an accommodation to the teacher/'
"Bud" RUey saw in it no "material advantage/' He
was not disposed to "acconmiodate the teacher" in that
way. School in June and July was a violation of nat-
ural laws. Holidays, alas, were rare, with intolerable
periods between : "Fourth of July — Circus Day — and
Decoration Day — ^but give him Saturday, when he
could play and play and play." As might be expected,
the humdrum of the school made a runaway out of
him. "I made a break," said he, "for the open world."
One day he hurried away in his bare feet down a dusty
lane to a cornfield; another day across an orchard to
Brandywine to listen to the splashing of the swimmers.
Another day he waded through the tall grass to an old
graveyard. Every boy knew of such a spot in the
early days. Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn ran
to one a mile or two from the village, an old-fashioned
western kind, "with a crazy board fence around
it." Such a cluster of pioneer graves the Riley lad
and his shabby companions found in their rambles,
"save," said Riley, "that it was enclosed with a zigzag
rail fence which the cows pushed down for grazing
purposes." Be it known, since the lads played Robin
Hood among the broken headstones and in the "Sher-
wood Forest" near, that their little souls were not
steeped in melancholy. Hard by stood the wide-spread-
ing beech with its lower boughs touching the earth,
the great baobab tree of Riley's childhood. How allur-
ing it was. Made magical by the soft summer atmos->
phere and the enchanting vista of open fields, to a boy
it seemed in the distance a gigantic mound of verdure,
over which he might roll and tumble as he would roll
in beds of blue-grass on the hillside.
Another day, smiling and laughing with his little

THE RHYME OF CHILDHOOD 41

friends, he ran away from school to the mulberry
tree. Was there ever anything more pathetic to a child
than that boy sitting at bis desk in hot weather, waiting
for a holiday to come ? And anjrthing more poetic than
his anticipation of that tree 7 The thought of it as he
ran onward with the boy^ down the long highway was
as balmy as the breeze^ that powdered his path with the
blossoms from the locust trees. 'The dust in the
road/' said Riley, **waa like velvet The odor from
ragweed and fennel was sweet a£r the scent of lilies
in the Garden of Eden/'

Several mulberry trees stood in fields round Green-
field, a venerable one in the edge of a meadow, east of
the Old Fair Ground, near Little Brandywine.
**I vividly recall," said Riley, '*how we used to scram-
ble across the meadow to that tree. Not until we were
directly beneath it did the birds, voraciously feeding on
the berries, see us, and then they flew away in a whir
of confusion. And the fruit of that tree! It had a
strange deliciousness. Simply — it was to all other
fruits as maple syrup is to all other syrups."

A rail was placed in the fork of the tree for boys to
climb. That rail led to Fame for one of them — but
how blissfully ignorant they were of all her trumpets
and temples ;

**What were all the green laurels of Fame unto me.
With my brows in the boughs of the mulberry tree?"

Some forty years after the poet's boyhood, Judge
David S. Gooding found a truant youth stealing down
the back ways of Greenfield, who tried to excuse his
truancy to the Judge on the ground that James Whit-
comb Riley ran away from school to a mulberry tree.
•*Yes, sir," returned the Judge, with his usual Doctor

42 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

Johnson air, "yes, sir — and when you, my lad, promise
to write as fine a poem as 'The Mulberry Tree,' you
may run away from school The Riley boy was wide-
awake ; he played Robin Hood ; he saw the leafy shade ;
he heard the flutter of birds ; you play nothing, you see
nothing, hear nothing; you are skulking, hiding along
the creek here like a burglar. Go back to school! —
read your books!"

Whatever may be said in behalf of modem school-
days with all their conveniences and improvements,
one fact is not disputed by those who recall the golden
glory of days gone by: that the children of the
present do not find the paradise in their surroundings
that many children of the pioneer day found in theirs.
Boys and girls had their sorrows then, it is true, but
they also had something the modem child too often
does not have — a Child-heart nourished with heaven-
bom visions and realizations of joy and beaut3\ Too
often the modem Child-heart is dwarfed and smothered
by the glitter of deception, show and sham. "The
Child-heart,'' the poet often said, and the older he
grew the more fervidly he said it :

"The Child-heart is so strange a little thing —
So mild — so timorously shy and small —
When growrirup hearts throb, it goes scampering
Behind the wall, nor dares peer out at all —

but could it peer out, could it come to us from the dark-
ness, could it light up this dull thing we call maturity,
could we become children in trust, in truth, in love,
then civilization would enter the kingd(»n of Heaven as
Jesus said — and that kingdom would be here and now,
I know," the poet continued, "the Bible says to put
away childish things, but we are not to put away the
Child-heart, the soul-reposing belief in things, the pure,

THE RHYME OF CHILDHOOD 48

•

heavenly absence of all pretension — ^we are not to put
that away. Why is it I can not read mythology to-
day? Because I have lost faith in it. Why, when I
read Pilgrim's Progress, I could see the whiskers on
Giant Despair as plain as day. But I could not have
read it had I known it was an allegory. All of these
fancies of my childhood have made it possible for me
to understand children now-a-days, and to portray them
more perfectly. When I come across a fanciful child,
just about as superstitious as I was, I know how to talk
to it and better how to write about the things it loves."

It was Riley's boyhood fortune to vibrate between
town and country. *1 was not quite a country boy/'
said he ; '1 lived in a little village, just across the alley
from the country. I associated with country boys and
girls. I was always on hand at the country gather-
ings. When I went to see my little friends in the coun-
try I stayed all night. I have slept four-in-a-bed after
a boisterous hunt with the boys for watermelons in
the cornfields. In all my associations with country peo-
ple there was always enough distinction for me to see
the better side of them as a visitor."

It is literally true that the poet in the morning-
tide of life realized the happiness of childhood
he so lovingly describes in his poems. In the
vicinity of Greenfield, that village of three or
four hundred inhabitants, he found a wondrous
world. He had his little share of disappointments,
of course, but they did not fill his childish cup
with bitterness. Within wandering distance of the
town he found the Paradise of Childhood. There in
season, the songs of orchard-birds dripped daily from
whispering trees. There was the green earth and the
infinite heavens above it he called the Child-World.

44 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

'The blossom-time of existence/' he wrote, recalling
his boyhood excursions;

"How always fair it was and fresh and new —
How every affluent hour heaped heart and eyes
With treasures of surprise."

Rapture infinite, mysteries unriddled but retaining
their primitive enchantment still — such the Riley lad
found in and around Greenfield.

After the poet had passed his fiftieth mile-stone he
frequently speculated on what Heaven would be like,
and the sort of life one would live there. 'We dream
of Heaven/' said he; *'we were in Heaven when we
were children and did not know it. The field is not lim-
ited/' he went on ; "you can imagine that anjrthing can
take place in Heaven; anything, anything. For in-
stance, you might imagine that things would go on
there as in frontier times they did here on earth.
Restore the rapture and rhythm of my childhood days
and I can not think of many improvements. In Heaven
each one of us might be assigned certain things to do,
certain daily tasks; and betimes we might ourselves
choose to do the thing we desire to do most of all.
Think of it ! Suppose I was permitted to drop on my
knees again and iiUiale the fragrance of crushed penny-
royal— permitted to go back to a day in my childhood,
the day I first wandered away with my little friends
to the mulberry tree — ^permitted to have the whole,
long joyous day before me again: be happy, ragged,
barefooted, with everything back as it used to
be — even to the stone-bruise on my heel. To have
over again one of those dewy mornings of fifty years
ago !"

The gracious smile of those days of old! To
Riley it was the glitter of the sun in tropic lands.

THE RHYME OF CHILDHOOD 45

Joyous winds winnowed cares from life as chaff from
the wheat. His blood was warm as wine. All things
throbbed with the pulse of spring.

In those days of obscure beginnings the recluse
who had lived in the cabin hy Walden Pond
published* his Story of Life in the Woods. "The
finest qualities of our nature/' he wrote, "like the bloom
of fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate
handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one
another thus tenderly. We have no time to be any-
thing but machines. We lay up treasures where moth
and rust corrupt and where thieves break through and
steal. Wasting our substance in blind obedience to
blundering oracles, we contract ourselves in a nutshell
of frivolous employment and creep down the road of
life."

Thus the recluse made his protest against the
vanities of civilized life. Soon after he made
it, there slipped away to the woods near
Greenfield a lad ten or twelve years of age, who
was destined to make a similar protest — ^not as a
recluse, not harshly, but gently, so deftly indeed that
the people began to nourish the finer qualities of their
nature without marking the precise moment when the
sunlight came to warm them into being. Alone
in the solitude, the lad stood on the shore
of a little "lake of light,*' whose wine-colored waters
were as transparent as the inland sea in Walden
Woods, although its homely name, Tharpe's Pond,
lacked the euphony of the classic New England name.
It was a balmy simtmier day. Wading into the warm,
"winey waters" up to his waist, he gazed through a
sky-window in the roof of the woods. What were his
thoufl^ts?

46 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

'TDid he sleep? Did he dream?

Did he wonder and doubt?
Were things what they seem?
Or were visions about?"

Forward from that day, he was never wholly alone in
the world — ^never just James Whitcomb Riley. There
was always beside him the lad of Used-To-Be, what he
called "the quivering, palpitating spirit of youth."
Sometimes the spirit was a vague, sometimes a vivid
presence. Whenever it was vivid, whenever he stood
before an unexplored world with the rapture of the
lad who stood before the deep, pathless forest, then
he could think the thoughts, live the hopes, and suffer
the tragedies of little folks. He could write verse for
children. "Often," said Riley, recalling his lost youth,
"I stood on the shore of the pond and gazed into the
interminable mystery of the woods. Every tree was a
fabulous consideration. Deer came with their antlers
up to question the approach of civilization. There
was a pigeon roost near. It was glorious at twilight
to see the pigeons drop down in swarms from the
clouds. The sky was full of fairies." Sometimes he
went alone to the pond. In the early morning, he said,
borrowing the dewy lines from Tennyson, the trees
were wrapped in a happy mist

"Like that which kept the heart of Eden green
Before the useful trouble of the rain."

The day the Riley lad waded into the sylvan wajfcerSf
that day "the poet was bom in his soul." For the first
time mysterious voices seemed to be talking to him.
They were feeble, indistinct, it was true ; nevertheless,
he was certain their murmur had a personal meaning.
The leaves tried to whisper to him. When the breeze

THE RHYME OF CHILDHOOD 47

wandered out of the thicket and stirred the waters, he
began to wonder what the ripples were saying. There
was a ''deep, purple wine of shade" in the forest, but
he did not see it then, — ^not for a fortnight of years.
It was enough as the seasons came and went that he
could distinctly recall the dawn of poetic perception.
Whenever he could vividly remember the boy he was
then, whenever he could wade through ''the lake of
light" in the woods, whenever he could translate the
song of the birds, whenever he could match the music
of lisping leaves with the harmony of human emotions,
whenever he could bask in the sun of Memory and
feel around him the invisible atmosphere of Love, he
could write poetry.

Such was the heavenly land of childhood for which
the poet could never find jewels enough to diamond
with his praise. The green earth vibrated with love
and wonder. There was ever a song of dewy morn-
ings, fragrant meadows, and joyous children. Others
might sing of Heaven — ^he rejoiced that they did — but
he would sing

'The praises of this lower Heaven with tireless voice

and tongue,
Even as the Master sanctions — ^while the heart beats

young."

CHAPTER m

SALAD DAYS— A CRISIS— AND A TRADE

MY SALAD days when I was green in judgment,"
says Cleopatra in the play — ''and soaked as a
sponge with love-sickness," added Riley, re-
peating her lines. **My salad days," said he, ''began
when I first fell in love with a schoolgirl and lasted
till my majority. If it is a question of verdancy, they
lasted longer. They were supposed to be school-days,
but since the schoolroom was a secondary matter, I call
them salad days. I was uncommonly green in jiidg-
menV*

The story of a school-day love appears in his
"Schoolboy Silhouettes," written at a later period for
the Indianapolis Herald, and reiterates the opinion
expressed in his early poem, "Friday Afternoon," that

"The old school-day romances
Are the dearest after all."

"Mousing about in a garret, among odds and ends,
in search of a boot-leg for a garden hinge," Riley
comes upon an old McGuffey Reader, and promptly
there is blown to him "a gust of memory from the Long
Ago." He finds on a fly leaf a schoolboy couplet :

"As sure as the vine doth the stump entwine
Thou art the lump of my saccharine."

"And who was the Lump?" he asks. 'Tiet me see^*
and in memory there suddenly blossoms into life the
shy, sweet face of Lily — ^no matter what the other

SALAD DAYS 49

name, since a long while ago it was thrown aside like
the rubbish in the garret. But Lily, 0 my Lily, comes
back and reigns again; and all the wine of love that
ripens in the musty bins of my old heart, boils up and
bubbles o'er. We were such friends, you know — such
tender, loving friends. I really believe our teacher (an
old maid with green spectacles, who had been suffering
with neuralgia for a week, and was heartless as a
hack-driver) — ^I really believe she hated us — at least
she always kept our desks far apart as the narrow
limits of the schoolroom would allow, and even at
'recess' invariably kept one of us in and sometimes
both for some real or fancied misdemeanor/' The boy
had thrown ''a kiss at Lily and she had blushed as rosy
as the apple she threw him in return." Miserere
daminel he failed to catch it, and it 'Vent bumping and
rattling among the slates and desks, tattling all the
tale of love." After a scuffle with the teacher, the
schoolboy lover was cornered in the woodbox,
savagely punched with the wrong end of the
broom — and made to stand with his face to
the wall all afternoon. After dismissal he was
''dressed down in the good old-fashioned method of the
time," and sent home. On leaving the schoolhouse the
boy stole a hasty glance through the window and was
astonished to discover ''the green-eyed dame bending
serenely over her desk — eating an apple."

Thus a schoolboy romance was brought to a tragic
end, which accounts for his clinging some fifteen years
after to a folded leaf from the girl's copy-book, with its
quaint old axiom, "There is no ship like friendship."
Lily's slender hand had traced the Unes. It gave him
pleasure to dream tenderly of the school-day episode,
while—

BO JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

'The echo of a measured strain
Beat time to nothing in his head.
From an odd corner of the brain/'

His interest in the frivolities of sentiment declined
slowly. Up to the advent of his bachelor days, he car-
ried love ditties in his pocket, one in particular by his
friend, John Hay, which, he said, ''dripped a sticky
kind of sweetness that made the society of young girls
interesting." Love ditties made the company of maid-
ens ''more intoxicating than things that delight the
palate."

The real tragedy of the schoolroom however was not
the trivial woes of school-day love. It was being
indoors. The Riley lad sat near a window and
just beyond it was the border-line of the Great
Out-of-Doors, which by all the laws of heart and mind
he considered his schoolhouse. He was in sight of the
National Road. At that particular time, the long
highway swarmed with evidences of the Pike's Peak ex-
citement. In summer and autumn there were all sorts
of animals in the cavalcade, horses, oxen, mules and
donkeys, crazy vehicles of every description, and men
with dogs driving hogs and turkeys to market. Riley
remembered that there was a cow hitched to a prairie
schooner. "Lightning Express" was painted in large
letters on the outside of the tent cloth to keep the emi-
grant's spirits up and the spectators smiling. With
such a lively procession passing the window daily it
was asking the impossible that a schoolboy should be
solemn or even studious. It was as natural for him to
laugh at things in that cavalcade as it was for lambs
to bleat or the chat to whistle.

His eyes fell one day on a picture that would kindle
the interest of the dullest youth. "I recall it as vividly,*'

SALAD DAYS 61

he wrote in the "Silhouettes/* "as if the pic-
ture were before me now — a bareheaded man,
perhaps fifty years old, a fanatic of the time,
harnessed like a horse, drawing a two-wheeled
cart along the street. He was a well-made man
of fifty years, perhaps, rugged as the horse he so oddly
represented. He was smoothly shaven as a priest and
pink-faced as a country girl. His hair was light and
clipped closely to the scalp, as if his brains had grown
too warm and needed cooling off. He seemed wholly
unconscious of the sensation he was creating in our
little village. Flocks of wondering women filled the
doors and windows as he passed, while the men-folks
dropped their garden tools and stood staring in amaze-
ment. Good St. Anthony himself could not have re-
pressed a smile at the antics of the two-legged centaur
as he cantered along, clucking to himself and shying
occasionally at an oyster-can, or an old boot lying by
the sidewalk. Following at his heels, the rag-tag and
bob-tail of the town completed the procession. The
man halted opposite the schoolhouse where he un-
hitched himself — ^frisked out of the harness — snorted
and kicked — lay down and rolled over a time or two —
shook himself and then abruptly began an incoherent
harangue on the subject of religion, interspersing his
remarks with love songs composed by himself, printed
copies of which he offered to the music-loving public
at the rate of five cents per ballad.*'

Now it is readily seen that here was cause for merri-
ment. The child of the doldrums must admit that such
an outbreak would seriously damage the discipline of a
schoolroom. "Our thrills of laughter and excitement,"
said Riley, "should have shaken the walls and rafters ;
instead, the school had to smother its mirth and put

52 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

its merry features to sleep/' His favorite teacher, Lee
0. Harris, would have let the children have their way
for one hour at least. 'The schooldame," he rhymed
pleasantly,

''Should have promptly resigrned her position —
Let them open a new Pandemonium there
^d set up a rival Perdition/'

Instead of doing tliat, she was vexed beyond endur-
ance. "Any further manifestation of this uncalled-for
levity," she stormed, "will be promptly met with the
punishment it richly merits/'

Lessons in arithmetic and geography were reviewed
and then the class came in the Fifth Reader to Irv-
ing's "Bobolink." At the same instant the fanatic
across the way "burst into an eruption of song." To
the Riley youth there was a striking similarity in the
happiness of the two strange birds. The man in the
street was a bobolink, too, "overcome with the ecstasy
of his own music." The lad envied him his freedom
as the Irving schoolboy had envied the bobolink
the freedom of the meadows. "No lessons, no task,
no school: nothing but holiday, frolic, green fields
and fine weather." While the class recited the lesson,
the youthful Riley gave wings to his imagination. He
was enchanted with his foolish fancies. Among them
was the frame-work of "a fairy tale, in which
a naughty bobolink should be transformed into a great
wingless man, who had to work like a donkey, and bray
songs for a living/'

The street entertainment was fleeting, but beyond it
in the fields and woods was a lodestar that drew the
lad's affections every day. Rather than "run the gaunt-
let of cross-examination," he ran to that. "In the

SALAD DAYS 63

woods/' he said, "flinty, two-edged problems of arith-
metic do not zip round my ears." ''The lad got his edu-
cation/' said his friend Bill Nye, ''by listening to the
inculcation of morals and then salljring forth with other
lads to see if Turner's plums were ripe. What glorious
holidays he took without consent of the teacher —
rambling in the woods all day, gathering nuts and paw-
paws and woodticks and mosquito bites/' How in-
scrutable to the Riley schoolboy were the punishments
the teacher inflicted, and they were still inscrutable
when he became a man. How pitiless "the melancholy
tribunals of visitors," whose way was to look reproach-
fully upon the ignorance of boys at the blackboard.
"Never a sigh," he wrote, "for the forty gipsy-hearted
children, panting in vain for

'The feeling of the breeze upon the face—
The feeling of the turf beneath the feet ;
And no walls but the far-off mountain-tops.' "

Boyhood visions of jolly seclusion on creek bottoms —
school books and schoolmasters could not rob the "luck-
less urchin" of these. "How the sunlight," Riley wrote
again, "laughed on afternoons, and danced about the
desks, and fluttered up and down the walls on wings of
gold ; and how it glided with its mystic touch each new-
bom leaf that trembled on the trees and filled and
flooded all the happy world beyond, until the very
atmosphere seemed drunken with delight." It is mani-
fest that Riley in his youth had a soul-hunger for free-
dom.

"His heart no formal schools would brook ;
But to himself the world he took."

"My school life," said he, "was a farce all the way
through. My Second Reader said : 'Some little boys do

54 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

not love their books/ I did not love mine, I never
heartily learned a school-book lesson in my life. When
I did answer a question the answer was whispered in
my ear by some one. I copied my blackboard work
from the classmate next to me. I could have learned
had I tried, but my obstinate nature could not brook
the fact that I was sent to school. My nature was full
of perversity. I tried McGuffey's Speller but the
author was so incoherent in his thought I gave up in
despair. The book showed haste in preparation and
was doubtless an answer to the call of a greedy pub-
lisher. I seldom saw the inside of a grammar, nor
have I any desire to see one ngw.'* (He was forty
years old when he said it.) ''Language came to me
naturally. When I was a boy,'* he went on, "schools
were run on the principle that the hardest method of
learning was the best. Flogging was still in favor as
was also the stupid old system of forcing boys to learn
by rote. My father was an old-fashioned man, very
strict in his rule over his children. One of his rules
applied to certain books they were forbidden to read.
Naturally I wanted to read those books. I did not care
a rap for the books he and my teachers prescribed. I
read the forbidden books, although I had to steal them
from the library to do it. That was my introduction to
mythology.*'

Evidently these are not the words of a dissimulator.
He tells the truth about himself, and is not overmuch
concerned about the consequences. It happened that
way and what had happened could not be recalled.

"I was bom thirty years ago," he once said to an
interviewer, "and reared at Greenfield — sl motherly
little old town, at whose apron-strings I am still tied.
I was sent to school at a very early age — and then sent

SALAD DAYS 55

back again. At the very beginnins: I conceived a dis-
like for its iron discipline, whose sole object seemed
to be to harness every mental energy into brute-like
subjection, and then drive it wherever old bat-eyed
Tyranny might suggest I could barely balance myself
on one leg when I began to kick in the traces and was
speedily labeled a bad boy.

"There was but one book at school in which I found
a single interest — ^McGuffey's Fourth Reader** (Love
for the Fifth Reader came after his school-days.) "It
was the tallest book known and ta boys of my size it
was a matter of eternal wonder how I could belong to
the big class in that Reader. At sixteen I could seldom
repeat the simplest schoolboy speech without breaking
down." Once, after hesitating with the usual awkward
repetition, he had to sit down "in wordless misery
among the unfeeling and derisive plaudits of the
school." After that, rather than repeat the harrowing
experience, he deliberately chose punishment. Some-
times he practised his declamation half an hour before
the ringing of the bell, but his heart failed him when
he thought of appearing before the school. Once he
prepared to entertain the school with the story of
"Casabianca," the gallant youth of thirteen, who stood
on the burning deck of a ship-of-war in a battle off
the mouth of the Nile. He trained for an old-time
Friday afternoon exercise, was told by his teacher to
speak out clear and full — ^not to hang his head — ^not to
let his arms hang down like empty sleeves — ^but to
stand up like a king and look everybody in the face —
in short, take "Casablanca" for his model, be brave
and speak out like a man.

"All in vain," said RHey. "When Friday afternoon
came I failed to appear. There was my hero of the

56 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

Nile, hinged to his post like Corporal Doubledick, firm
as a rock and brave as Mars :

'Beautiful and bright he stood,
As bom to rule the storm ;
A creature of heroic blood,
A proud, though child-like form/

There he stood while sailors deserted the sinking ship
and here was I in Greenfield, the most incurable coward
that ever had the honor of birth on Hoosier soil; a
timid, backward boy as I have been a bashful man. In
some way, unaccountable to me, I was bereft of choice.
The schoolroom seemed a little firmament, all bright
with gleaming eyes. I could not keep from blanching.
Doom came unbidden."

One of the Fourth Reader incidents borders on the
pathetic. "My eccentricities," he observed long years
after the incident when all had been forgiven, "were
not only the dismay of the schoolroom, but a source of
great torment to my father whom I loved and respected,
for all I dodged about a great deal to avoid obeying
him. We were just beginning the new Reader, and as
usual I had finished it before the class had read ten
lessons. There were several poems in the book and
one of these. The Dying Soldier,' I read over and over
again. I had to cry when I read it."

Old schoolboys and schoolgirls remember it still — a
Blue soldier and a Gray, who would never again see
"the daylight's soft surprise" —

"Two soldiers, lying as they fell

Upon the reddened clay —
In day-time, foes ; at night, in peace,
Breathing their lives away."

Fate only had made them foes. Death leveled all.

SALAD DAYS 57

Under the midnight moon and stars — ^brought face to
face before God's mercy-seat, a softened feeling rose :

"Forgive each other while we may ;

Life's but a weary game,
And, right or wrong, the morning sun
Will find us, dead, the same/'

So the sun did find them. The Angel of Love came to
the battle-plain and mantled their lifeless forms with
the vesture of peace :

''And a little girl with golden hair,
And one with dark eyes bright.
On Hampshire's hills, and Georgia's plain.
Were fatherless that night"

"Well," Riley continued, "the class came to those
pathetic lines. I knew my place in the class and also
knew I could not read them before the class without
tears. I resolved not to cry in public, and since there
was only one way out of it, I ran away. While the
teacher's back was turned I slipped through the door
into the street and had hardly left the schoolhouse when
I met my father, who of course had immediately to
know what I was doing away from school. I had just
read the life of Washington and concluded I would try
the cherry-tree act. I told the truth, explained to my
father that I did not want to cry before the school.
His ^es flashed wrath like sparks from a furnace fire
I thought that was punishment enough, but when he
severely whipped me, I experienced a revulsive feeling
and for several years after I seldom thought of him
kindly. I don't blame him now. His nature was such
that he could not appreciate the situation. He doubt
less thought my explanation an excuse to get out of
school. But the injustice of it I could not forget."
The ways of moral mentors, the youthful Riley could

58 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

not understand. Indeed, it puzzled him when he grew
to manhood. Why (in substance) he asked, should a
schoohnaster be thrown into a state of suspense because
the boy Audubon devoted more time to birds in the
garden than to books on his desk? What is it in the
wayward and impulsive natures of boys and girls that
their elders can not brook ? Why is it that fathers and
mothers so covetously cherish the divine command,
"Children, obey your parents," and yet find no warm
nook within the breast for that houseless truth, the old
Lapland song, that goes wailing through the world :

"A boy's will is the wind's will.
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts"?

The sequel to this estrangement from his father oc-
curred twenty years later. After drifting about here
and there for a decade, Riley came to try his fortune
in Indianapolis. "I began to write poetry," said he,
"and in time became rather notorioits for that. The
people of the city made a great deal of me, and now
and then rumors of my reputation reached the little
town where my father lived. He could not see what
the people saw in those things of mine, no more than
Mark Twain's father could appreciate the humorous
antics and stories the author related of himself in Tom
Sawyer. He could not see why my dialect was worth
so much money, and finally gave up trying to under-
stand it. I went out to see him frequently, and one
day persuaded him to return with me. When we
reached the city, we went to a clothing store. He was
pretty well dressed for a country lawyer but not quite
as well as I thought he ought to be for the city. I
bought him a new outfit from hat to shoes, and then
took him home with me to the Denison Hotel. I told
the landlord we wanted the best room in the house.

SALAD DAYS 69

After dinner we walked about the city together. He
was pointed out to friends as my father. I tell you
that did me good. It was another proud day in my life.
Neither of us recalled the misunderstanding of long
ago."

The schoolboy's Fourth Reader period was followed
by the interval of "worthless accomplishments" he
called his "Dime-novel-and-Byronic-verse age.*^ Both
home and school forbade those pleasures. In the "Sil-
houettes" he tells of successful ventures with novels
in the schoolroom. He attributed his artifice to an old
desk-mate, but he himself was the "unreadable char-
acter" he describes. He could secrete things in his desk
and have them, as he said, "handy as 'good morning/ "
He had nerve and was the leader on truant excursions,
as well as the hero of commotions in the schoolroom
when he returned with a bottle of grasshoppers in his
pocket. If boys got into dilemmas their "old desk-
mate" could not get them out of, the case was indeed
hopeless. He knew all sorts of turns to make and
"wore his conscience as carelessly as he did his cap."
He was proud of all emergencies which required his
advice, and, when enforcing his opinions, had a pecu-
liar way of impressing his clients on the breast with
his fore-finger.

For a while he read novels quite successfully during
school hours in the manner of Irving's enjojmient of
Robinson Crusoe, by snatching hasty moments for read-
ing under the shelter of his desk. He eluded the teach-
er's eye, he says in the "Silhouettes," by holding the
tabooed pamphlet on his geography, and that on his
knee with one hand ever ready to shove the story in
his desk, leaving his eyes apparently on his lesson.
One day the movement of his arm or ttie guilty look on

60 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

his face led to discovery, and he was waylaid by the
teacher and punished. Since he defied all rules of time
and place, he forthwith provided his need with a
clothes-pin (one of the spring variety) and a rubber
band attached. Fastening the band to the back
of his desk inside, he clamped the novel in the spring,
stretched the band forward for the convenience of the
eye, and read the alluring pages without fear of detec-
tion. When the teacher came peaking around, all he
had to do was to raise his thumb and the rubber
hid the little old 'Trairie Flower" in a jiffy.

Riley really desired an education, but could not
find in * the schoolroom the nourishment his
heart required. He envied the pupils of an
older time, whose fortune it was to go to school
to Chiron, who taught them horsemanship, how to cure
diseases, how to play on the harp, and other branches
of knowledge, instead of giving instruction in granunar
and arithmetic. And particularly he envied Jason, the
athletic youth, who resolved to seek his fortune in the
world without asking the teacher's advice or telling
him anjrthing about it.

Such a failure as Riley's in arithmetic has seldom
been recorded. "I could not," said he, "tell twice ten
from twice eternity." History was his bete noir. He
knew nothing of Columbus, or "the glorious country
expressly discovered for the purpose of industry and
learning," as his teacher would have him believe. He
did not have, as he wrote in one of his prose sketches,
"the apt way of skimming down the placid rills of
learning." But he did possess the "extraordinary
knack of acquiring such information as was not taught
at school," and, as he was told, had no place in the busy
hive of knowledge. He knew all about Captain Eidd —

J/ ^ Maj^ 9r4M:t ^•^ Aiw^

^fr,ii,'y^.

TiiK Pokt's II.\M)wurnN(; thk Ykak ok His Vision

^ • » « •

^\^ "3 Ic^i-*^ 'wiw^tTTporf^ ic^ow.

~C>»-««fe^?^JlBrl-4oi\[j|U<.

Ills IlANDWBri'lXli TWKXTY-TIIRKK YKABS T/ATEB

SALAD DAYS 61

could sing the history of the pirate from A to Izzard,
sing it with more interest than his schoohnates sang
geography. He knew how to slip a chip imder the
corner of the school clock in order to tilt it out of bal-
ance and time, how to ride a horse face backward, and
sometimes his story of a gallop to the woods had a de-
moralizing effect on the "Industrial Hive."

As might be expected, Nemesis crossed his path.
The horse ran away and brought his reckless riding
to an end. As Riley remarked when older, flavoring
bis thought with the humor from "Peter BelF' : "Old
Retribution came down the highway and left me in a
half-conscious Heap at the roadside with

• . . • 'dim recollections
Of pedlers tramping on their rounds ;
Milk-pans and pails; and odd collections
, Of saws and proverbs : and reflections

Old parsons make in burying-grounds.'

Nemesis was present at other times. One winter
day she was with George Kingry, a burly youth,
and a half-dozen smaller boys, including the Riley
lad, while skating on a cranberry marsh. Like so many
links in a chain, the boys were holding on to coat-tails
when they crashed through the ice into nine feet of
water. After floundering about, Kingry caught hold
of a willow bough and brought his strand of urchins
to shore.

"You seem to have repaired to other shrines besides
Tharpe's Pond," said his clergyman friend, Myron
Reed, to whom Riley told the incident. "Oh," returned
Riley, "I was not Apollo's ward all the time." He once
compared notes with Joe Jefferson. "There are certain
facts of our boyhood — yours and mine," said
Jefferson, "about which there can be no mis-

»f

62 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

take. Evidently we were bad boys and hard
to manage/' On various occasions Riley openly
admitted he was not a Model Boy. ''Ssnnptoms
of evil," he said, "broke out early on me." He was no
more a Model Boy on the banks of Brandsrwine than
was Mark Twain on the banks of the Mississippi. The
latter^s allusion to that character is too good for omis-
sion: "If the Model Boy," says Twain, "was in the
Sunday-school, I did not see him. The Model Boy of
my time — ^we never had but one — was perfect : perfect
in manners, perfect in dress, perfect in conduct, per-
fect in filial piety, perfect in exterior godliness ; but at
bottom he was a prig ; and as for the contents of his
skull, they could have changed place with the contents
of a pie, and nobody would have been the worse off
for it but the pie."

From Mark Twain to Montaigne — Riley once ob-
served— ^there is invariably independence of thought
and action in the youth of men who have left the im-
press of greatness on their time. Montaigne was
brought up without rigor or compulsion, brought up,
as he said, "in all mildnesse and libertie." There was a
lack of discipline during his impressionable years, and
that, according to Riley, gave charm to the old French-
man's life and work.

In those days of dissatisfaction and rambling
endeavor, there was one exception, that in con-
trast to his woes of the schoolroom was as sun-
light unto lamplight, — ^the influence upon the Riley
youth of a friend whose heart and hand were
ever warm and sympathetic, the "Schoolmaster and
Songmaster" enshrined in grateful memory, the benign
monitor of old Masonic Hall and Greenfidd Academy.

SALAD DAYS 63

It was not in the Hall or Academy however that the
influence was generative.

The Schoolmaster became the author of such delect-
able verse as ''The Bonny Brown Quail/' ''Along the
Banks of Brandywine/' "Moonlight in the Forest,"
and "Crooked Jim." To the youth with "poetic symp-
toms" he was from the first a positive inspiration. The
scene of that inspiration was chiefly the Schoolmaster's
home and vicinity, some two miles from town on Little
Brandjrwine. There the pupil found refuge from
grammar and arithmetic There he was welcome at
all hours of the day — and the night, too, for he often
remained over, that he might have more abundantly
the inspiration he coveted. He was in the academy of
outdoor life. He found there, to a large degree, the
counterpart of the school he had read about in mythol-
ogy. He had a singer for a schoolmaster, one who
talked about the birth of Time, the wondrous earth, the
treasures of the hills, the language of birds, of health
and the mission of life, and of mysteries that too long
had been hidden from the knowledge of mankind. In
that outdoor school. Nature played on "a harp of gold
with a golden key." Like the lads of old, the youthful
Riley could lie on the dry leaves of the woods and think
and dream, and return to the house at night and sleep
a wholesome sleep. No waste of time in remorse,
with which life in the town sometimes afflicted him.
He could grow up to the full height of manhood as
Jason had grown under the excellent direction of
Chiron. Alas! the Schoolmaster's instruction did not
wholly correspond to Chiron's training. It was not
ideal. Neverttieless, it was sufficiently enchanting to
make the pupil eternally gratef uL

64 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

The Schoolmaster was a wise guide in reading. He
gave the youth Cooper's novels and thus lifted the cur-
tain on American scenery and adventures on the
frontier of civilization. Bret Harte told him stories
of dare-devil, impulsive, courageous men, toiling in the
morning-time of a state — "Bret Harte," the pupil said,
"the subtlest manipulator of English on the face of the
earth." Dickens enchanted him. The Master thought
the pupil should know something of the Waverley
novels.

'Read Ivounhoe** said he.

'I don't like Scott," returned the pupil.

"Then try MiddlemarchJ'

"Too sad; I don't like heavy things; I want to be
interested."

As the seasons came and went there was communion
with field and woodland. Hints of a coming poet were
plentiful — ^bits of verse here and there on scraps of
paper and the fly leaves of old books. Often Master and
pupil strolled together through the "sugar orchards"
and beyond them into the depths of the wild ; often (as
the Master wrote)

"They heard the great fond heart of Nature beat,
And felt an impulse in the solitude
To cast themselves in homage at her feet."

When the pupil became ecstatic over the vales of the
Elburz Mountains, and the golden prime of old Bagdad
days, as told in the Persian tale he was reading, the
Schoolmaster pointed to the enchanted land of the
present, "right here where we stand," said he, "richer
fruited than anything Aladdin ever found in the
wizard's cave. A mightier power than slave of lamp or
ring waves her wand above the American woods."

SALAD DAYS 65

When the pupil became a poet he did not neglect the
early lesson. "My realm is at home/' he wrote;

"Go, ye bards of classic themes
Pipe your songs by classic streams ;

I will sing of black haws, May-apples, and pennyrojral ;
of hazel thickets, sycamores, and shellbark hickories
in the pathless woods/'

Longfellow walking with his favorite teacher amid
the groves of Brunswick did not love him more affec-
tionately than Riley loved the Schoolmaster. Both
praised their teachers in prose and verse. Riley's
tributes in pr6se were summed up in a brief address
before an Indiana State Teachers' Assembly, after he
had passed the meridian of life. There was no diminu-
tion of gratitude : —

"My last teacher," he said, "I remember with an
affection no less fervent than my first. He was a man
of many gifts, a profound lover of literature and a
modest producer in story and in song, in history, and
even in romance and drama, although his life-effort
was given first of all to education. To him I owe pos-
sibly the first gratitude of my heart and soul, since,
after a brief warfare, upon our first acquaintance as
teacher and pupil, he informed me gently but firmly
that since I was so persistent in secretly reading novels
during school hours he would insist upon his right to
choose the novel I should read, whereupon the
'Beadle' and 'Munro' dime novels were discarded for
masterpieces of fiction ; so that it may be virtually re-
corded that the first study of literature in a Hoosier
country school was (perhaps very consciously) intro-
duced by my first of literary friends and inspirers. Cap-
tain Lee 0. Harris of Greenfield/'

C6 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

Notwithstanding the humdrum of his school-days,
Riley was inclined to think of his teachers as a ''long
list of benefactors." He pleasantly remembered John
W. Lacy, his teacher in rhetoric. Even "the rigid
gentleman with green goggles" who lifted him from
the desk by the ears when he was a boy, and whom he
resolved to thrash when he became a man — even he was
given a fraction of his gratitude.

Riley had a brief schoolroom experience after his
"reconstruction period" with Captain Harris — so brief
and incoherent indeed that he seldom honored it with
consideration. In January, 1870, the new school build-
ing "was ready for occupation," said the county paper.
"School opened with 236 pupils." Among them was
"James W. Riley." Here seems to have been the first
time he was dignified with so long a name. He chose
reading, rhetoric and arithmetic Doctor William M.
Pierson, a classmate and lifelong friend, observed that
in rhetoric Riley "did not study figures of speech and
style ; he delved in the beauties of literature found in
the quotations." Things went fairly well for six weeks
when he received a weekly report which brought his
public school-days to an end. There was a black line on
the report, "the Black Line of Latitude," said Riley,
"that ran across my world on the sixtieth parallel.
Below it was the Pit of Failure, the dark discreditable
region of reproach and misdemeanors, that kept me in
a state of suspense from the hour the bell rang till
dismissal. One day I dropped so perilously near the
black line in Arithmetic, I quit school forever." Like
Herbert Spencer, "he could not pass the examination."
Like Edison, "he did not have the apparatus."

Prior to quitting school Riley had been chosen editor
of The Criterion, a school paper to which he gave

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68 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

the ambitious motto: **Vem, vidi, vid/^ It 'Tiad
struggled into existence," he wrote, "under grievous
disadvantages/' The second issue (and the last), two
dozen pages of foolscap, written with lead pencil and
bound tastefully in pamphlet form, appeared March 14,
1870, and as customary was read by its editor before
a school society. "It was my first venture in the news-
paper field," said he, in humorous vein years after,
"but I didn't see anything nor conquer anjrthing. I
strangled the infant with a dose of verbosity."

On the last page appeared "A Fragment," which, he
sportively said, "was my first poetic effort to see the
light of publication." The "Fragment" mourned the
decease of the rival school paper. The Amendment,
whose fate also was to die prematurely :

"Swiftly and surely
With a frenzied cry, demurely
Into the valley of death

Crossed The Amendment.

"Quick, like a f o'-hoss team.
With a Shawnee warrior scream
Into the boiling stream

Dove The Amendment.

"Still down and down they pass— r
Green o'er their graves the grass — •
Down in the valley of death

Lies The Amendment."

The subject of these pages had now passed into his
twentieth year. He had come to a crisis in his life.
Indeed the previous summer, while hoeing in a garden
with his father one hot evening, he had profited by
what may seem to some a crisis of minor significance ;
but it was not a minor incident to him. His faculties

SALAD DAYS 69

hungered for expansion in other fields of labor. For
the first time his father discovered there was granite
in the son's will. "My father/' said Riley, recalling
the incident, "had moved to the edge of town and was
tending a garden. He was a good gardener. I was
poor. Like Rmnty Wilfer, I had never yet obtained
the modest object of my ambition, which was to wear a
complete new suit of clothes, hat and boots included,
at one time. I desired to go into 'society,' and one
evening resolved to make the attempt. I stood before
the glass, in an old suit and was putting on a paper
collar and a butterfly tie. My big toe was coming
through my shoe, and to give my white sock the color
of the shoe at that point I stained my toe with ink.
With his usual contempt for 'fashion,' my father looked
at me from the tail of his eye and said with the curl
of the lip, 'Well, my son, now that you are ready to go
into society, we'll go into the garden and hoe weeds.'
I followed him. After we had hoed a little while, I
fell behind and grew melancholy and saucy. 'You
don't seem to like work/ said my father sarcastically.
'No !' I thundered. Seizing the end of my hoe-handle
with both hands, I flung it into a neighbor lot, leaped
the fence and walked down-town, leaving my father
white with rage. In about an hour I came back.
Leaning against the fence, I said, 'Father, I am here,
not to hoe weeds, but to tell you I am sorry I spoke to
you in anger.' He gazed at me in astonishment. The
silence was painful. Then he said in a tone of tender-
ness I had not heard before, 'My son, come down to
the ofiice to-night. I want to talk to you.' At the ofiice
we came to an understanding. He went his way and I
went mine."

Tradition has it that he ran down an alley from the

70 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

Srarden muttering to himself "The Farewell to the
Farm/' a country poet's fiery resolve, —

"Not to be a farmer.
Not to plow the sod,
Nor hop another clod."

"Was it tradition?" he was asked some thirty years
after. "Fact and tradition," he promptly returned ; "I
used language that would sear the walls of a synagogue.
I resolved never to work with a hoe again — and I never
did." For several years following, his paternal rela-
tions were strained — strained at times to a tension that
was painful — ^by just such a grievance as that which
beset Mark Twain and his father. They were almost
Always on distant terms — as Twain said, they were in a
state of armed neutrality.

Riley's garden resolution may. peem to some an ab-
rupt disapproval of farming. Nothing could be more
foreign to truth. In his sight, a thrifty cornfield was as
essential to the progress of man as a poem. But there
were men designed of Heaven for the agricultural pur-
suit. He was not one of them. He had labored in his
little solitude long enough. There was budding within
him "a desire to tread a stage on which he could take
longer strides, and speak to a larger audience." Or to
say it as Myron Reed said it : "You can not make a
prosperous farmer out of Robert Bums. One line of
power is enough for one man."

In the spring of 1870, Riley went to work for
"a shoemaker of renown," affectionately known
about town as old Tom Snow. He had clerked in the
store but a few weeks when its proprietor was laid in
the grave, the store taken for debt, and the clerk thrown
out of emplojmaent. The greatest trial however in that

SALAD DAYS 71

year of shadbw, the trial that most deeply affected his
f uture, was the loss of his mother, who died suddenly
one Tuesday morning in August. The bereavement
caused a complete change in his life. It sent him into
the world to make his own living, and in numerous
ways it was a forlorn road he had to travel.

A few hours after her death he walked alone
through a cornfield to a favorite retreat south of
the railroad, an old clearing, where on a later
day (as will be seen) he received his message from
the South Wind and the Sun. But on that particular
forenoon he looked straight up from the tall iron-
weeds into God's great lonesome sky, —

"Bowed with silence vast in weight
As that which falls on one who stands
For the first time on ocean sands.
Seeing and feeling all the great
Awe of the waves as they wash the lands.*'

*Tl was alone,'' said he, "till as in a vision I saw my
mother smiling back upon me from the blue fields of
love — ^when lo ! she was young again. Suddenly I had
the assurance that I would meet her somewhere in
another world. I was gathering the fruit of what had
been so happily impressed on me in childhood. I had
seen that the world is a stage. Now I saw that the
universe is a stage. Another curtain had been lifted.
My mother was enraptured at the sight of new scen-
ery. It was the dream of Heaven with which 'Johnny
Appleseed' had impressed my mother in the Missis-
sinewa cabin."

Forward from that lonely hour there was a light
on Riley's path that ever seemed the refulgence of his
mother's smile. When the memory of the vision had
been hallowed by length of years, he left a transcript

72 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

of it in two delicate stanzas he entitled "Transfigured."
Childhood and immortal youth were synonymous :

"A stately figure, rapt and awed,

In her new guise of Angelhood,
Still lingered, wistful — ^knowing God
Was very good ;

"Her thought's fine whisper filled the pause,

And, listening, the Master smiled,
And lo ! the stately Angel was
A UtUe child."

From his cradle his mother's voice had ever been a
living song of sympathy. There was a poetic charm
in her name — Elizabeth. Its cadence lingered as tune-
fully on his lips as the music of love in his heart. Re-
calling stories of her joy and heroism in days of poverty
and suffering, her "perseverance under all doubts and
dangers," he thought of her as the "Little Nell" of the
frontier — "Little Nell" she was, with the additional
crown of marriage and motherhood. like the heroine
of fiction, she had lead a wandering life. Her parents
had brought her through a wilderness of wild animals
and pioneer settlements. From the "Old North State"
up through the Blue Ridge solitudes she had come,
through Cumberland Gap and on through the wilds of
Kentucky — a journey of some seven hundred miles in
a one-horse wagon. The son dearly loved the tradition
of his mother's girlhood days in Randolph County.
He saw her strolling away from her cabin home
to new scenery in the forest. From her he had
inherited the spirit of investigation. As her chief
delight was to trace tributaries and rivulets to
their sources, so was he joyous when tracing
threads of thought and action back to their foun-

SALAD DAYS 78

tainheads. Her maidenhood on the Mississinewa
was to him an ideal life. The stream was for her the
''Beautiful River'' that rose somewhere in the Great
Buckeye Woods and ran merrily by her door. As she
stood there in the light of morning skies, she was his
dream of the "Golden Girl," the idyllic Muse that came
to accompany him the year he caught the vision of his
mission*

To have been loved, it has been finely said, is better
than to have built the Parthenon. Elizabeth Marine
Riley was loved. She was the heroine of trials which
are not chronicled in earthly records, but in all ways
she was upheld and sustained by the ties of friend-
ship. She was as hopeful as Spring. She augured the
harvest of universal good. In old Persian phrase (to
repeat what her son often repeated) , ''taking the first
step with the good thought, the second with the good
word, and the third with the good deed, she entered
Paradise."

A turn in the road had really come. The invisible
Messenger had passed, the mother had gone to a land
where there are no tears, and home ties had been
broken. He was no longer a schoolboy but J. W. — *
sometimes James W. Riley. Fate had denied him a
clerkship in a store, and he had been^ to quote a school-
mate, "the most celebrated failure in arithmetic in
the county.'' Old folks prophesied life failure. "They
did not think I would amount to much at home," said
Riley, recalling the days. "Being a lawyer my father
believed in facts. He had little use for a boy who could
not learn arithmetic. There were others of the same
opinion. My schoolmates had an aptitude for figures
and stood well in their classes. The result was half
the town pitied me. Again and again I was told I

74 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

would have to be supported by the family. Something
had to be done. I knew it — ^and my father knew it.
So I went over to Rushville to sell Bibles." The father
was doubtful of the issuej, as is shown in the following
letter :

Greenfield, Indiana,
December 19, 1870.
My Dear Boy:

I have been patiently waiting for a letter from you
and have received none. Scarcely an hour passes with-
out my thinking of you and wondering how you are
getting along? how you are doing? and how you are
managing? I have had much more experience in the
world than you. It is all important that you associate
with none but those of good character, that you be
self-reliant and aim high, and suffer no stain to at-
tach to your conduct. I would like to counsel and ad-
vise with you. Please write me fully and confidently,
and all reasonable assistance in my power I will render.
We are all well, and have been anxiously looking and
waiting for you to come home. Somehow I don't think
your book business is paying but I may be mistaken.
I hope I am, and would like to know more about it,
and more about the man who is with you. Don't fail
to write immediately. I will be absent until Wednes-
day or Thursday in Hamilton County, defending two
men charged with murder.

With a Father's deep solicitude for you,
I am very truly and affectionately,

R. A. Riley.

"It turned out," said Riley, "that citizens of Rush-
ville had all the Bibles they needed ; they had not time
to read those they had." So in the first weeks of 1871
he found himself with a Number 5 paint brush and a
bucketful of paint under the eaves painting a house in
Greenfield. "I was not quite so melancholy as Tom
Sawyer," said he, "but the walls of that house did have

SALAD DAYS 75

a far-reaching look like a continent, just as the long,
unwhitewashed fence looked to Tom."

Riley had learned house-painting on hot sununer
days a year or so before. 'Tainting frame houses was
my vacation/' said he. Having become an efficient
house-painter, he and two associates contracted with
the trustees to paint the new Public School building.
"The dome/' said Riley, "looked two hundred feet high.
Being the most nimble, I had to paint it. We attached
a rope to the pinnacle and with brush and bucket I
scaled it over the cornice. It was perilous, suspended
there between heaven and earth. I did not stop then
to write a couplet. I did not revel in the RoUo Books."
A friend wrote him that his climbing the paint ladder
was 'typical of the coming man on the ladder of fame.
There is not much danger," said the friend, gently re-
ferring to his habits, "while standing on the lower
round, but beware when your feet stand on the rounds
near the top. I am anxious to see the day when the
world will appreciate you for what you are worth,
but I do not want you to fly the track. Put on plenty
of sandi and reverse on the down grade/'

His house-painting was the attainment of one or
two summer vacations. The sign-painting trade re-
quired more time. Symptoms of his ability in that line
were seen in his school-days. Very early he developed a
"knack for drawing." School books, scraps of paper
and old envelopes bore evidence of his gift. Cunning
borders and clever tail-pieces were found on almost
every page. He made sketches with a goose-quill pen.
With no outside aid, he surpassed the efforts of many
students under the guidance of masters. He aspired
to be a portrait painter, "improvised a studio," and at
the age of fourteen drew a creditable sketch of his

76 JAMES WHITCOMB PwILEY

father sitting by the fireside. Standing before a mir-
ror he made a crayon drawing of himself. His sister
Elva remembered crayons of George and Martha Wash-
ington, and with what pride he pointed to them on his
"studio" waD.

Various suggestions for drawings came from
MontieWs Geography. One illustration in particular
he remembered — "Daniel Boone with the melan-
choly hounds and a deceased deer at his feeV Another
was the picture of the Hoosier State seal. What the
lad did with that drawing was afterward worked up
for amusement into a prose sketch. The pioneer in the
picture, a stalwart man in shirt-sleeves, was hacking
away at a tree without deigning to notice the stam-
peding buffalo. Riley took his "graphic pen and
mounted each plunging buffalo with a daring rider
holding a slack bridle-rein in one hand, and with the
other swinging a plug hat in the most exultant and
defiant manner."

Riley learned sign-painting within a year under the
rambling instruction of a veteran of the trade. His
father paid the tuition in the hope that it would
develop into something better for the son, since he
was making such hopeless progress in the schoolroom.
To some it seemed a step down the ladder from the
Academy to a paintshop. The shop, a ramshackle
establishment near the railroad, was a group of old
granaries, with their walls full of knot-holes. There
was an adjoining apartment filled with a family of
noisy negro children whose father, as Riley phrased
it, "was the most competent stutterer in the
county." Riley's course in painting included graining,
penciling and a few short lessons in landscape. He
did not "block out" as did the other beginners. He

SALAD DAYS 77

simply did the work offhand with an artistic efficiency
peculiar and pleasing to himself. He measured with
the eye, but he was as painstaking and exacting as he
was afterward in the preparation of manuscripts.
When lettering he often made capitals from graceful
patterns which he himself had designed. '

That he was soon beyond the aid of his instructor
was proved by a picture of a greyhound on a sign
which he painted that "was so perfect, children going
by were afraid of the dog." Riley's native town began
to take notice of him. His drawings and his accidental
jingles were quoted by friends as "proofs of his
inspiration/' though the little circle of skeptics around
him still prophesied failure. He bestowed on them, it
is said, something more than the contempt of silence,
and resolved to prove to his native town that it had
wronged a man who deserved to succeed.

Having learned his trade, and having quit school,
Bible-selling, and house-painting, Riley established him-
self in a shop of his own. Customers would find him
"at the head of the stairs, over the drug store." He
advertised on a large card with pictorial designs,
which he was permitted to hang in the post-office. This
caught the attention of the county papers. "Our
young friend, J. W. Riley," said the Democrat,
'%as a sign for himself that is a credit to him."
"That sign in the post-office," said the Com^
mercial, "is attracting considerable attention and
much merriment." A feature of the sign was
a silhouetted figure, a lad standing with two
fingers upraised and out^spread — ^the signal among the
boys that there was a good time coming at the Old
Swimmin' Hole. "While waiting for the turn of for-
tune," said Riley, "I covered all the bams and fences

78 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

with advertisements. All the while I was nibbling at
the rhyme-maker's trade, and this was a source of irri-
tation to my father. The outlook was not encouraging.
He thought I should devote my time exclusively to paint-
ing." That the painter made some money by the way
is shown by memoranda and receipts. These also show
a demand for him away from home.

MEMORANDA

Go to Palestine to-morrow at twelve o'clock to letter
wagon for L. H. Clayton. Terms $2.50 and expenses.

Greenfield, Indiana.
For painting signs for Poulson & Jones, as follows :

3 doors $5.00

1 gilt sign, 2 sides $5.00

1 gilt sign, 1 side $2.50

1 window blind $2.00

Total $14.50

Received payment,

J. W. Riley.

"It was holding the wolf by the ears," said he, refer-
ring to "the time that tried his soles." "Like Jason,
I had but one sandal to my foot." He went on to tell
how he was pursued by creditors, but there was more
humor than insolvency in what he said. "I kept a
lookout at every alley and comer. If any one looked at
me I fled like quicksilver. I shifted from place to place,
like George Morland. I was acquainted with every
spot of secrecy in Center Township."

As he drew a worn memorandum book from his
pocket, a chum asked, "Is that to remind you of a sign
to paint in Fountaintown ?" "Not exactly," replied
Riley, "I enter in this book the names of creditors

SALAD DAYS 79

whose door I can not pass any more. This dinner we
have enjoyed on credit to-day at the Guymon House
closes Main Street. I bought a pair of pumps on State
Street last week which forbids more buying in that
quarter. There is but one avenue open — South Street
— and I shall have to stop that to-night with a bag of
meal. The roads are closing in all directions and un-
less my uncle in the Lone Star State sends me a remit-
tance soon, I shall have to go round by Tailholt to get
home."

It has been said that "no background of poverty or
early hardships can be provided for this poet of the
people." But this assertion is not supported by the
facts. "We were poor/' said Riley, referring to the loss
of his father's law practice after the Civil War, "so
poor we had to move into a cheerless house in the edge
of a cornfield, our homestead having been lost in a
luckless trade for land on the prairies." He went on in
a jocular way to recount his experience with old-time
house parties, how he had folded his overcoat on his
arm to hide the rents in the lining, and how he had
worn his Derby hat wrong side foremost to make less
conspicuous a hole in the brim.

In explanation of property losses it is due the father
to add that he suffered injuries for life from the ex-
plosion of a shell at the battle of Rich Mountain. The
consequent loss of power was followed by the loss of
prestige and property. He had what Goethe's father
had, "a bent for puttering," but this could not be said
of him before his injury on the battle-field;

The poverty of those days must not be construed into
a state of indigence. As Riley observed on another
occasion, "We were poor but not pitifully poor. When
I was a boy there were no very rich nor very poor. We

80 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

drive through the country in a carriage. A tousled,
barefooted, bareheaded boy in overalls steps into the
dog fennel at the side of the road to let us pass, and
some one remarks, Toor child !' Poor? he is rich; every
day three meals of potatoes and com bread and milk —
freedom, fresh air, miles of landscape, blackberries and
watermelons in season and walnuts for Christmas. One
summer while my father was gone to war, we were so
.poor my mother had to pin on my clothing. After a
splash in the Old Swimmin' Hole, it took the help of
two boys to pin it on. Yet I was rich. The lads of
to-day have no such shady bower for splashing as I
had. Lincoln had a rich boyhood. To be born in a
log cabin is to be rich. I came within an ace of missing
it. Had Lincoln been bom amid a wilderness of brick
and lath and nails and mortar, he never would have
become the Savior of his Country. I once heard a
speaker say of the cabin in Kentucky that it is now
lifted and set on one of the shining summits of the
world — and so it is. Lincoln was a rich man. He lived
in the American woods. They said it was a mental
wilderness. It was a mental university. How rich he
was with that handful of seven books by the cabin fire.
What value he attached to his visit to this world, every
day a day of discovery, a new survey of facts and prin-
ciples, every day reaching out like the wide-spreading
trees around him for soil and water. I would rather
see what he saw and loved than see the sky-line of a
great city.'*

Riley always made it clear that he would rather have
the Lincoln experience than suffer the blight of pros-
perity. Once after hearing David Swing he contem-
plated a lecture on "The Sunny Side of Poverty." We
all have known, Swing had said, some poor girl to

SALAD DAYS 81

bend over her sewing and sing far into the nighty not
because sewing and poverty are sweet, but because the
cares and sorrows of life had been baptized in the
great flowing river of love. "My mother," said Riley,
"was baptized in that river. That baptism revealed
the heroic in her —

Only those are crowned and sainted
Who with grief have been acquainted.

In days of prosperity she was beautiful. She was
heroic and saintly during the war and after, in the
days of adversity."

"The poet of the people should wear overalls," Riley
remarked to a wealthy friend, while winning his way
to distinction. The remark was not made in jest.
It was no vain pretense of sympathy for those in
straightened circumstance. He had met the require-
ments. He was entitled to his prosperity. He had
not capitalized his hardships. He had not bewailed
his fate. He had accepted what the wheel of fortune
brought him, not always contentedly, but never in a
vindictive spirit. He observed with much glee
that it was the loss of a sandal that sent Jason on
the quest for the Golden Fleece. Thus by joking about
his lot, the sign-painter endeared himself to his friends
and ultimately to the American people. 'Toverty," he
affirmed, "is the north wind that lashes men like Mark
Twain and Lincoln into Vikings — ^women like May Al-
cott, it makes a queen of the earth. She was enshrined
in the heart of mankind, not because she had to do
second work including washing at two dollars a week —
not that Her history is inspiring because she rose
above two dollars a week. She smiled at the thumping
of fate. It made her, as she herself said, a sweet, ripe
old pippin before she died."

82 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

Though the seasons brought hard times to Riley, his
signs brought prosperity to others. Like the rustic
in As You Like It, he was shepherd to other men, and
did not shear the fleece he grazed.

"Hart and Thayer

Hart and Thayer

All the wool

You have to spare

Take it along

To Hart and Thayer."

Thus ran the homely jingle on sign-boards nailed up
on the highways leading into town — "the first rhyme,"
said a thrifty farmer, "that ever stimulated sheep
growing in Hancock County." It proved to be
such a hit and brought so much business to the
firm that other signs appeared on roads farther
away from the center of trade. "Shilling poetry,"
the farmers called it, and well they might, for it
raised the price of wool. Rhjrme-spinning was
vying with the song of the loom. Greenfield drew
trade from neighboring counties to the extent that the
wool industry assumed the appearance of "smuggling,"
by which was meant the sale of wool in Greenfield that,
by the unwritten laws of trade, belonged to merchants
in Newcastle and Shelbjrville. Loss to those towns
seemed to require legislation, or the attention of a mon-
arch like Edward III to prohibit the exportation of wool
"under pain of life and limb." "Wool was not a drug
on the market," a merchant humorously remarked.
"Flemish weavers began to look our way. Business
vied with trade from Argentina and the Falkland
Isles."

The sign-painter, it niay be observed parenthetically,
was beginning the search for a Golden Fleece, but he

SALAD DAYS 83

had not dreamed of his efforts affecting trade in pure
bred merinos and Silesian wools. It may also be said
that his profession was not wholly modem, although
many features of it were peculiar to his time, several
originating with him. Nor was the occupation wholly
commonplace, and certainly it was not menial, even
though Riley ''had but one coat to his back, and that
had frazzled sleeves and patches on the elbows/' Sign-
boards had been painted by such great artists as Ho-
garth, Wilson and Correggio. A few years before Riley
climbed to the roof of the Greenfield school building,
Archibald Willard, famous for his painting, "The
Spirit of '76," was gilding wheels and axletrees in a
carriage factory in Ohio.

All in all, in this transitional period, Riley was not
in bad company.

CHAPTER IV

THE ARGONAUT AMONG OLD BOOK$

HE WAS fresh and vigorous; he was animated
with hope ; he was incited by desire ; he walked
swiftly over the valleys and saw the hills grad-
ually rising before him/'

This paragraph from an old school Reader gave Riley
elemental pleasure. "Just to repeat it," said he, "gives
delight like the music of warblers or the fragrance of
May-apples." It was from a lesson entitled "A Pic-
ture of Human Life." He approved the picture,
drawing the line only on the counsel of the hermit who
discouraged the indulgence of pleasure. There were, to
be sure, pleasures that brought dissatisfaction in the
wake of the disasters attending them ; but there was a
universe of pleasure that did not end in prostration,
remorse and suffering. The hermit scorned enjoy-
ment. He limited travelers to the main road. They
were not to forsake the common track, which was the
dusty, uneven way of the plain. They were to forego
the pleasure derived from the music of birds, the
sparkle of fountains and the murmur of water-falls.
To mount a hill for a fresh prospect, or trace the course
of a gentle river among the trees was to overspread the
sky with clouds and invite the tempest.

Riley promptly disregarded the hermit's counsel.
Poetic natures the world over, he thought, should create
and discover scenes of happiness. This meant for the
discoverers release from custom. Without such release

THE ARGONAUT AMONG OLD BOOKS 85

the light of their lives was lost. To travel the main
highway exclusively as the hermit advised, was to
court mediocrity. It was to impoverish human re-
sources. The main road for the indifferent, those who
lost themselves in the crowd ; but when a young man
had in his heart something that distinguished him from
the common run of men, he necessarily had to depart
from the beaten path. The very law of his existence
meant a new road, to travel onward along which meant
gardens of pleasure. To enjoy these gardens was not,
in consequence, to lose the happiness of innocence, not
to forsake the paths of virtue. One could make life
picturesque without indulging evil passions.

Thus it was, as a young man entering ''the arena of
the firmament," that Riley made his own picture of
human life. In reality there were two pictures. As he
grew to manhood, these took definite form and became
paramount in importance, the one blending with the
other. He divided the world into prose and poetry.
Whenever what he thought or did related to the prosaic
side of existence, he was a Pilgrim. From early man-
hood he desired to write a narrative poem of consider-
able length to be entitled "The Mayflower Voyage," the
mission of the poem being to make it a little clearer
to the readers that his life was just such a voyage. By
idealizing incidents of courage and self-sacrifice he
hoped to develop a dramatic narrative that would en-
noble the perseverance, refresh the faith, and stimulate
the hope of the people. Although he failed to write the
poem, he did not fail to experience the Pilgrim's fate,
"the fate of all men," said he, "who grapple courag-
eously with the problems of human progress. All
citizens worthy the name make the Pilgrim vcqr-
age, and it is a piece of good fortune that they

86 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

have to make it. Trial grows character. The lives
of our statesmen were foreshadowed in the stormy
passage of the Mayflower. Necessarily they were men
of sorrows. The Ship of State gave them many sleep-
less nights. Now, paradoxical as it seems, there are in
the experience of the poet as in the lives of statesmen,
days dark as night. His bark, like the Ship of State, is
often driven through perilous waters. Like the Pil-
grim, the poet is buffeted by billows within and without.
He is destined to follow his star in the pathless way
through fogs and blinding rain. It does not strain the
truth to say that he is tossed on frozen shores bleak and
drear as the coasts of death."

"Such is life,*' said Riley, "when yoked to the prosaic
side of human existence.*' But there was another pic-
ture and with it he was enraptured. He was a Pil-
grim, but chiefly he was an Argonaut in search of a
Golden Fleece. The glow of feeling in the man in the
spring days of his genius when he found what he called
"a wisp of the Fleecej" and within it the thread of gold
for a poem (the climax in the last stanza as all Riley
readers know), when he found that, his rapture was
as heavenly as the divinity of youth. Sometimes the
work of a single night sparkled with jewels, and when
daybreak came he had the threads for several poems.
They were the gifts of the gods. Lest he lose them, he
wrote the stanza immediately, which accounts for the
singular fact that he often wrote the last stanza first
when building a poem.

His Argonautic dream dates back to boyhood when
he first began to think of life as a voyage of discovery,
back to the days when Uncle Mart and Almon Keefer
held the children captive with fairy stories, when little
"Bud" lay on his back in the shade of —

THE ARGONAUT AMONG OLD BOOKS 87

*The red-apple-tree, with dreamy eyes
And Argo-f ancies voyaging the skies/'

The particular book that gave birth to the dream of the
Golden Fleece was Hawthorne's Tanglewood Tales,
which just then was coming over the Alleghanies in its
first edition. "This enterprise, you will understand,"
Uncle Mart read from the Tales, "was of all others, the
most difficult and dangerous in the world. In the first
place, it would be necessary to make a long voyage
through unknown seas. There was hardly a hope, or a
possibility, that any young man who should undertake
the voyage would either succeed in obtaining the Golden
Fleece, or would survive to return home and tell of the
perils he had run.*' In simple English, writing poetry,
to say nothing of the quest for Golden Fleece in other
fields, was one of the most difficult things to do under
the sun. The youthful Riley however saw not the diffi-
culties attending the voyage. Children then as now
were "blessedly blind'* to facts such as these. His inter-
est centered in the galley and the heroes with helmets
and shields who were willing to row him, if need be,
"to the remotest edge of the world." Not the least
among his heroes.being Orpheus the harper, who played
upon the lyre so sweetly that the beasts of the fields
capered to the music. The dangers and difficulties were
reserved for the school of experience.

Tales of other heroes, the Argonauts of Forty-Nine,
were heard in those days. These kindled in the Riley
youth the spirit of adventure. His earliest recollec-
tions were of the gold-fever excitement. Soon after
1849, the National Road became a westward stream
of vagrants. The stream passed his childhood door. The
Overland Route through the South Pass to San Fran-
cisco was advertised in Indiana conmiunities. Young

88 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

•

men having packs and good animals were asked to fall
into the ranks and cross the continent. They could
reach gold in one hundred and twenty days. They
were told the land by the sundown sea was ''the
finest new country of which the human race has any
knowledge." The lure of the Far Wfest was very great.
It had drawn Bret Harte to the Golden Gate at the age
of seventeen. A few years later Mark Twain had gone
bounding in a stage-coach over the Great Divide to
Nevada. 'It was an assemblage of young men/' said
Twain, referring to the driving population of the min-
ing regions — "not simpering, dainty kid-gloved weak-
lings, but stalwart, muscular, dauntless young braves,
brimful of push and energy, and royally endowed with
every attribute that goes to make up a peerless and
magnificent manhood. No women, no children, no gray
and stooping veterans — ^none but erect, bright-eyed,
quick-moving, strong-handed young giants — ^the most
gallant host that ever trooped down the startled soli-
tudes of an unpeopled land.''

When a spectacle like that smites the vision of a
young man, he is likely to lift his moorings and follow
the adventuring crowd. But the ways of Fortune do
not all lie to westward. It turned out that the Golden
Fleece which Riley sought was not on the hillsides of
the American Fork, nor was California to be his "Land
of the Afternoon."

Soon after leaving Greenfield to try his fortune in
other Hoosier towns, he chanced to hear Bret Harte
lecture on "The Argonauts of Forty-Nine." After
that for several years he was dominated by the spirit
of adventure, although it never led him to distant
lands. The Hoosier world was large enough. The
hinnorous Moral to Roughing It he took seriously:

THE ARGONAUT AMONG OLD BOOKS 8d

'7/ you are of any account, stay at home and make your
way by faithful diligence^'

As he looked out over his native state, he was filled
like Orpheus with a desire to sing of a wondrous world,
and how all things spring from love. He talked
extravagantly of the Golden Fleece. His heart was
aflame in ''The Argonaut/' one of his early poems, a
copy of which he carried from town to town in his
pocket till it was worn threadbare and lost. He read
it aloud when he could find a friendly listener. One
stanza was decidedly Argonautic:

"And mistily as through a veil,

I catch the glances of a sea
Of sapphire, dimpled with a gale
From Colchis blowing, where the sail

Of Jason's Argo beckons me."

As he bowled through the country, he was "a Forty-
Niner — the blessedest creature on the earth" — but
never when he thus thought of himself was he a Cali-
fornia gold-seeker. Always he had in mind the joyous
year of his birth, and how he had started from the box
cradle on his life voyage of discovery.

Riley was a Pilgrim when hampered with the routine
and cares of business, when struggling with
debt, when the day was a series of banalities
and distractions. But he was an Argonaut from
the cradle, and that picture of human life, like the
fairy interest in his work, was always with him
when he was doing what Heaven designed him to do.
Since he was chiefly an Argonaut, the reader is asked
to think of him as such in the following chapters — and
first to follow him in his quest for Golden Fleece among
old books.

The records of a Greenfield Sunday-school once in-

90 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

eluded a report by J. W. Riley, secretary pro tempore.
He and his companions had wandered into the church
out of the rain. In the absence of the regular secretary,
he was asked to write the minutes and if so inclined to
make some remarks. His report was a rare departure
from custom, his langruage being an alarm to the ''an-
cient worthies," the dismay of the ignorant, and a sur-
prise to all. Never before had those church walls
echoed a phraseology so verbose and unaccountable.
On leaving the church, a wide awake member of the
flock seized the secretary pro tern, cordially by the
arm and requested him to come again. **You serve
us," said he, "and sleep-worship in this sanctuary will
write over the door of its departure the days that are
no more." It seems that Riley had by design or acci-
dent found a collection of good old English books.
Having browsed at will on ''that fair and wholesome
pasturage," he was on that Sunday morning, as on
other occasions, eager to exercise his new vocabulary.
It was Riley's fortune to love the beauty and knowl-
edge he gathered from books for their own sake.
Like most boys, he began by reading light novels.
Though they were trashy, he gleaned from them more
or less information and a knowledge of words.
Happily, there lived near, a wise mother, Rhoda Hough-
ton Millikan, who had her own method of lur-
ing boys and girls to good books. She was not
alarmed when they began to devour dime novels. She
placed a copy of The Sketch Book on the center table
where her son and the "Riley boy" might find it. "Let
them nibble at it," said she, "and they will come to the
good books by and by." And they did. After reading
The Sketch Book, Riley called for more and was given
The Alhambra, and Irving's biography of Oliver Gold-

THE ARGONAUT AMONG OLD BOOKS 91

smith. Thus he ascended the Catskills with Rip Van
Winkle, thus he was lured to castles in Spain, and thus
did the author of The Traveller kindle Riley's passion
for wandering, and acquaint him with the pleasures
and miseries of the scribbling tribe.

It was fortunate for Riley that Mrs. Millikan was a
friend of the best literature. He had once been her
pupiL She was a woman of heroic type, having reared
her family of five children after her husband
had been lost — ^with other Argonauts — ^in the Cali-
fornia gold fields. In her youth she had lived
near the Green Mountains. Irving was her patron
saint. When she said, "I love him dearly,'' the boys
knew she did. After Riley's first poem had been
printed in a local paper, she spoke to him of his future,
recalling what she had read in an old prospectus of
the first edition of The Sketch Book. "Irving," she
said, ''did not aspire to high honors; it was the dear
wish of his heart to have a secure and cherished though
humble comer in the good opinion and kind feelings of
his countrymen. This, James, was a worthy ambition.
You can have a similar comer in the hearts of your
countrymen."

To Mrs. Millikan (and a London shoemaker, as the
reader will see elsewhere) is due the credit for opening
to Riley the door to good literature. She was the first
of the Greenfield prophets, the first ib see in ''the
strange young man" the possibilities of authorship, and
it was her happy fortune to see him rise to the sunmiit
of his fame.

About the middle of the last century a New Har-
mony philanthropist established in Greenfield the
McClure Township Library, a collection of three hun-
dred volumes, including a series on Success in Life, the

92 JAMES WHITCOMB PwILEY

Queens of England, Macaulay's England, the Works of
Washington Irving, the RoUo Books, Cooper's Novels,
Prescott's Histories, and a full line of the poets. The
Library had a precarious existence. From its first
home in the county Court House, it drifted successively
into the schoolhouse, a boot and shoe store, a grocery
store, until finally it was scattered among fami-
lies of the town. But wherever its home, it was
a Mecca for young Riley. A few histories he read,
but with little interest. His taste ran to fiction
and poetry. He read Weem's Life of Washington^
which in spite of the fables, he said, "is a better
book than the later lives with the fable left out.
Lincoln grew up with that book. It is more nutritious
than the dull chronicle of juiceless facts."

It may be observed in passing that Riley did not limit
truth to fact. He liked immensely what Thomas
Brackett Reed said about it. 'Why," asked Reed, "are
stories of great men invented? Because the truth is
deeper than the fact." "Truth," said Riley, "is a lim-
itless realm ; it is universal ; it lies back, around, above
and below our feeble expression of it and the expression
great men give it. A thing need not necessarily hap-
pen in order to be a fact. If it is told exactly the way
it would happen if it did happen, it is as absolutely true
as if it had already happened. We are told that there
was no such Washington as we fable — and it is true.
In other words we have made and are still making our
Washington. The Washington the people love is not
solely the Washington of history, but the larger Wash-
ington, the cumulative dream of the National Mind."

In the Township Library Riley also found the Life of
Daniel Boone, the SvHss Family Robinson, Don Quixote,
Robin Hood, Robinson Crusoe, and what was to him

THE ARGONAUT AMONG OLD BOOKS 93

dearest of all, the Arabian Nights. ''Its author was no
pessimist/' he remarked in after years, ''although far
away in the Persian desert He was the Robert Louis
Stevenson of his time ; he fed the hungry, put a coat
on the world^s back, built a warm fire for its comfort
and bade it be of good cheer. I can never efface from
memory the scenes of that book. They have been theme
and inspiration to me. To this day when I sniff coal-
oil, it is sweet as violets, for I think of Aladdin and
the Wonderful Lamp. I see the huge iron door at my
feet. It is raised for me; I descend the narrow steps
and pass through the caves of riches and find jewels
on the trees.''

• But the leaven from the Library, the most generative
and far-reaching in its effect was The Lives of Eminent
British Painters and Sculptors, five leather-bound vol-
umes with a long title, which, as Bill Nye might remark,
was simplified for talking purposes. "Where's Riley?"
some one asked. "Oh," answered an old-timer, "he's
up there readin' them British Books." Thus the vol-
umes were designated, and affectionately, too, when it
was known how dearly the young Argonaut loved thenu
They were

"The pleasant books, that silently among

The household treasures, took familiar places,
And were to him as if a living tongue
Spake from the printed leaves or pictured faces."

When the remnant of the old Library was scattered
among the Greenfield patrons, by common consent the
"British Books" became Riley's property, and thus it
was that he read them again and again. Almost all that
he accomplished in those years of growing manhood
was directly or indirectly traceable to the influence of
those books, and even after his fame was assured, still

94 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

those household treasures spoke to him from their
printed pages. In them he found excuses for his con-
ceits and eccentricities. His interest in grotesque com-
binations, his sjrmpathy for illiterate people, his love of
seclusion, his scorn of extravagance, his freedom from
the shackles of imitation, his determination to reach
the goal on an individual road — all had a parallel in the
lives of those British artists.

"Fair Britannia," a waggish rhjmier once wrote,

"Flung to her right and her left.

Funny people with wings,
Among elephants, Roundheads,
And Cataba kings'' ;

but the funniest, the oddest, the most whimsical of all,
the wag averred, were her children of genius known as
painters and sculptors. Riley agreed with the wag. As
he saw it, the artists touched life at almost every con-
ceivable point. "They were erratic men, hot-tem-
pered," said he ; "they were headstrong and presumptu-
ous, they manifested early proofs of inspiration, ttiey
were divinely interesting, tiiey were good, they were
bad, they were weak, they were strong, wise, foolish —
so are men of genius in all times."

In the "British Books" Riley found Sir Thomas Law-
rence, who taught that a man should be on good terms
with himself, the prudent artist who veiled his pros-
perity that he might have the applause of his friends.

There was Sir Joshua Reynolds, who held that
drudgery lay on the road to genius, the painter
who drew excellence from innumerable sources,
paid atteuition to all opinions, and obtained valuable
hints from the rudest minds. And Cosway, who
formed good resolutions by day and broke them when
fhe lamps were lighted; and Northcote, who had no

The Poet's Fathes, Captaiik Reuben A, Rilet

THE ARGONAUT AMONG OLD BOOKS 95

first out-flashings of genius, but grew slowly up into
eminence year by year — ^the artist who all his life was
afflicted with "false spelling*' — ^the youth whose interest
in Jack the Giant Killer never diminished — ^the man
who could never open the book without his eyes filling
with tears.

There was Gainsborough, the son of the cloth-worker,
the "father of modern landscape,'' and Mortimer,
frequenting sequestered places on the seacoast
amid smugglers. And Copley, who refused to offer
up his time and money on the altar of that expen-
sive idol, a wife ; and John Flaxman, the little sculptor,
who showed that wedlock is for an artist's good rather
than his harm.

There was William Hogarth, who taught that the
study of nature is the short and safe way to knowledge
— ^Hogarth, the painter of the Distressed Poet, an artist
famed for his humorous insight, his power of story-
telling, a genius of the first order, who proved that
entertainmep.t and information are not all that i9
required of genius, that the public wish to be elevated
by contemplating what is noble, warmed by the pres-
ence of the heroic, and charmed and made happy by
the sight of purity and loveliness.

So the list continued. There were Harlow, Romney,
Bird, and Opie — and West, whose fame, though great,
was not purchased by trials, and hence was not endur-
ing. There were Bennington and Blake and Barry —
all in all, a goodly company for a young man in search
of a Golden Fleece. The books were stories of good old
English pluck and heroism, full of folly, of heart-
sorrow, of obstacles surmounted, of rectitude and re-
nown.

The poet's friend, Myron Reed, was always able to

96 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

Bee primary significance in obscure incidents that h&d
been cast aside by the historians and biographers.
''Abraham Lincoln/' said he, 'liad some excellent com-
pany at New Salem — ^a village loafer, a dry-goods box
whittler, and an expert black bass fisherman, who knew
the best books on earth. There is at least one such man
in every village. Whitcomb Riley had such a man.
They do not make or wreck railroads, but they help boys
to know what to read and what not to read. One of
them is a small Socrates in a small town.''

The Greenfield Socrates was a jolly Englishman, old
Tom Snow, "the first man of letters," said Riley, "the
town ever knew" — a rare old shoemaker who knew
what elders often do not know, that it is not wise for
"October to be always preaching at June." Riley
traced his literary lineage back to the Englishman's
ancestry in London. Tom Snow was Riley's Old Man
with a chronic supply of family troubles, who, despite
them, never grew old, never became "stale, juiceless,
or unpalatable." His was the roguish face with smiles
hidden behind a solenm masquerade,

"While his eyes were wet as dry
Reading novels on the sly."

He was the oracle enshrined in the affections of the
children, the sponsor for good in everything, who kin-
dled the smiles of youth — and the smile of a poet ; the
hale old heart that brimmed and overran

"With the strange enchanted sights,
And the splendors and delights
Of the old Arabicm Nights.'*

He was the cobbler of lasting fame, who "seeketh soles
to save," the jovial shoemaker who was hailed —

THE ARGONAUT AMONG OLD BOOKS 97

"For all his goodly deeds —
Yea, bless him free for booting thee-^
The first of all thy needs."

'In a little side-show of existence/' said Rilqr at a
banquet, 'Tom Snow was the old man who was always
worth the full price of admission.'' He had been a
member of London literary clubs and had, for those
days, a vast knowledge of English authors. He was a
superior reader, having been employed for thirteen
years to read to ''a flock of Elnglish shoemakers/' his
chief duty being to explain the text while books were
discussed. His experience on coming to America was
similar to that of Martin Chuzzlewitt He was the
unfortunate owner of a spongy tract of swamp-land
near Greenfield. ''Standing in the middle of it," said
Riley, ''lie could wobble and shake the whole farm, and
I was always glad that he could ; nature never made him
for an existence of trials and privations like that."
Finding that nothing but calamus would grow on the
land, the Englishman opened a shoe-shop in Greenfield
and later established himself in a bookstore, gathering
under his roof the driftwood of the Township Library,
which had been first secured through his efforts.

Rain or shine, hot or cold, the Shoe-Shop was head-
quarters for all sorts and conditions of village life, par-
ticularly for young fellows inclined to reading. The
discussion of books continued as in London. Some-
times the lads came together to loaf and chatter over
scraps of town fiction or history; at other times for
games. It was not unusual to see the Argonaut
humped up with an antagonist in the comer over a
checkerboard, marching his platoon of wooden war-
riors to and fro, and at intervals crooning the silence
with a "little wind-through-the-keyhole-whistle, while

98 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

looking for a place where he could swap one man for
two."

The youthful Rile/s affection for his old English
guide and instructor deserves to become as proverbial
as the love of Telemachus for the faithful Mentor.
Tom Snow was the children's Peter Pindar, — and in
those days boys and girls were Children till they were
twenty. Hogarth would have been charmed at the sight
of the modern Mentor telling the Riley boy the story
of Gog and Magog, the last two of a race of giants
who were brought to London and chained to the king's
palace, how the king made them serve as porters, how
their effigies stood in front of Guildhall, and how when
the clock on St. Paul's struck twelve they descended
from their pedestals to go into the Hall for dinner, and
how they were destroyed in the Great Fire. "That
story," said Riley, "embellished by his quaint varia-
tions, gave the Old Man a parquet seat in my affec-
tions." And the Shoe-Shop, too, was enshrined in his
love. That was a rare picture of the dear Long Ago,
when the Old Man read the story of Little Nell, when he

• . . "arose and from his pack's scant treasure

A hoarded volume drew.
And games were dropped from hands of listless leisure

To hear the tale anew."

The Greenfield Socrates was a lover of old saws,
but the foe of all he thought untrue. "Good beginning,
bad ending : Boys," he exclaimed, accenting the remark
with his hammer, "it is false. A good beginning is
half the battle ! Better yet — ^good beginning, good end-
ing. Now in reading begin right — ^read Dickens." He
had brought from London a full set of his favorite
author, and the Argonaut, having arrived at the read-
ing age of discretion, was introduced to the "greatest

THE ARGONAUT AMONG OLD BOOKS 99

novelist of the world/' He immediately began to satisfy
his hunger for life as it is. He had not gone far be-
fore he met the beloved Tiny Tim with his cheery "God
bless us every one/' He was soon aware that Dickens
knew every street and alley in London, and that his
novels cover every phase of Anglo-Saxon life. "He is
the showman of literature/' Riley remarked >when
older; 'lie draws the curtain and there are the per-
formers/' Thus was the youth lured among thieves;
thus he heard the cries of the mob. On he went past
Toby Veck and Master Humphrey's Clock, down with
the author into the most degraded comers of the
Metropolis, among the vilest creatures, through "the
dirtiest and darkest streets of the world/'

"Hold!" cried the Old Man, '*you are reading too
fast Take this," handing him Old Curiosity Shop;
'^memorize this," referring to the death of Little Nell.
" 'When I die, put me near something that has loved
the light and had the sky above it always,' — ^where do
you find an3rthing in books so full of feeling as that?
Master that and I will teach you to recite it."

Without knowing it the Shoemaker was extending a
hand to an American audience a hundred thousand
strong. The youth to whom he spoke was to rise to a
shining summit on the platform. He was to rival
Dickens' public readings in their palmiest days. The
Shoemaker had been an actor in London ; he knew the
rostnun requirements, knew when an author was a
failure in reading from his own works. One of his
dreams was to take the youthful Riley to hear Dickens
on the last American tour, and one readily imagines
the disappointment in the Shoe-Shop when the author
came no farther west than Buffalo. "We will hear
Dickens," repeated the Shoemaker, "we will hear him

100 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

if we have to walk to the Academy of Music through
a snowstorm."

For several years after the Shoemaker moved to
Greenfield, the space round his shop was used as a
hitching ground for country teams. As a meeting-
place it rivaled the space round the Court House. There
from cabins and clearings gathered a company of pio-
neers to hear the news of the week — unselfish and some-
times eccentric types of Hoosier life and character. It
was a fallow feeding ground for a hungry youth, afford-
ing an opportunity for education seldom equaled in
the annals of frontier life. There were the "Riley
Folks/^

"The hale, hard-working people —
The kindly country people —
That Uncle used to know*';

the Loehrs and the Hammonds, Tubb Eingry and Tugg
Martin, the Griggsby family, the Local Politician, Old
John Henry, and Squire Leachman, "as honest a
farmer as ever drew the breath of life,'* — ^these and
a score of others who were later enshrined in the
poet's verse — ^upright, reliable freeholders, or men and
women striving to be such. That there were excep-
tions to uprightness goes without argument — on off
days, and rally days, for instance, when the Hominy
Ridge Clan appeared "with plumes and banners gay."
Once when the old town happened to have its face
turned the other way, and the barefoot fellows were
feeling the worse for their wild oats, they rode their
prancing steeds up and down the sidewalks, the chief
of the Clan riding savagely through the front door into
a hardware store — ^thereby supplying the community

THE ARGONAUT AMONG OLD BOOKS 101

with excitement for a week, and affording loafers an
opportunity to witness a fine exhibition of English
wrath when the Clan rode past the Shoemaker's door.
The Shoemaker deserves our thanks for directing
Riley to the best literature. When he introduced the
lad to Oliver Twist, he conferred a favor on posterity.
What he did added to the happiness of innumerable
future homes. It meant cheer for the heart-breaking,
smiles and laughter for firesides in generations to
come.

•'Creeping on where Time has been,
A rare old plant is the Ivy green"—

thus the gray haired Mentor repeated the couplet,
gently, ''trippingly on the tongue" as the London play-
ers did — ^little dreaming that fame would cling to him
and his Shoe-Shop as the ivy to ruins — little dreaming
that the Riley youth in the dear afterwhiles would
voice in 'The Enduring," a poem that would add charm
to life wherever the English tongue is spoken. For
Mentor and pupil it is a loving illustration of what
Dickens had told them that nothing beautiful and good
sees death or is forgotten.

Riley began to read Dickens before he quit school—^
indeed, he neglected the schoolroom for a course in
literature at the Shoe-Shop. The influence of the
novels upon him at that impressionable age is incom-
putable. He appropriated their language and used it
till it seemed his own. He was. so fascinated with the
stories that as he grew to maturity, their humor and
pathos became part and parcel of his character and
conversation.

From the Shoe-Shop forward, reading became a re-

102 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

quirement so essential that Riley seldom left home
without an old satchel and a half dozen books — "my
reticule," he phrased it, when a bird of passage.

While visiting: once in a neighboring town he
found a broken-backed copy of The Task, which held
him within its grasp for the whole of an April day.
It contrasted the charms of rural life with the novelty
and allurements of the town. He learned that Nature
deceives no student and that wisdom is to be won by
slow solicitation. He was warned of the fatal habit
of swallowing what he read without pause or medita-
tion. As he lay there, face downward, on the bare floor
of a scantily furnished room, he was fully persuaded
that he was not "the victim of luxurious ease." "I was
poor," he said, "not a poor vagrant but a poor bird of
passage who was rich without knowing it, poor as the
truant Cowper was poor, rambling on the banks of the
Thames, subsisting on scarlet-hips and blushing crabs."

It may seem to some a trifling affection for a genius
who grew by feeding on Irving, Dickens, Harte, and
Cowper to care deeply for a series of school readers.
But so Riley did. No other series of books, in
his opinion, had so affected the morals and the
happiness of children. He appreciated to the ut-
most the sentiment Frances Willard expressed when
she offered a hundred dollars for a set of the first edi-
tion. "The compiler," he remarked, "was a genius, and
deserves a monument from the generation he so signally
nourished and elevated." His favorite of the series
was the Fifth Reader, a book many old boys and girls
will remember, compiled by Professor William H.
McGuffey of Miami University. Riley loved the book
chiefly for its poems. "I liked to memorize them," he
remarked when fifty years old. "If I had the Reader

THE ARGONAUT AMONG OLD BOOKS 103

now you would find the pages of poetry turned down
at the corners, the verses underlined, and the margins
decorated with sketches— crags, cliffs, landscapes and
faces/' In his latter days it was once permitted him to
see an old copy of the second edition. He gazed upon
the homely treasures of its pages with feelings that
were tenderly retrospective, "feelings that resembled
sorrow,*' he said, "as mist resembles rain/'

The compiler of the Readers had chosen his selec-
tions from the best in all English literature. It
had been his object, as the preface stated, to present
"the best specimens of style and especially to exert a
decided and healthy moral and religious influence/'
The child or the savage orator, McGufFey observed,
never makes a mistake in inflection, or emphasis, or
modulation. The best speakers and readers were those
who followed the impulse of nature as felt in their own.
hearts.

Perhaps after all Professor McGuffey did have a
monument in the wide, unrivaled influence Riley
exerted on the platform. The poet never looked for
help to schools of elocution. He followed "the impulse
of nature in his own heart," as the old books directed.

Every reader, as Longfellow remarked, has his first
book, that is, one book among all others that fasci-
nates his imagination and satisfies the desires of his
mind. Riley had such a book. Other books were near
and dear to him, the "British Books," the Fifth Reader,
Oliver Tivist, Old Curiosity Shop, and Arabian Nights
— so that about the Shoe-Shop and Court House he
was known as "the lad of nine books," probably in re-
sponse to the tradition that Lincoln was "the lad of
seven books/' But none of these twined their pages
about his heartstrings as did Longfellow's Poems. It

104 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

was a current Baying in Greenfield that Riley knew The
Spamish Student by heart The charm of the poems
was never broken. He read them with abiding affec-
tion. They were among the books carried from place
to place in his "reticule." For thirty years the Cam-
bridge Edition of Longfellow was his traveling com-
panion. The first thing to do on entering a room at a
hotel was to lay the book on the table. It was his mas«
cot. He did not always read it, but the heavenly
monitor was always in sight. Whenever he op^ied it,
like Longfellow opening The Sketch Book, he also
opened "the mysterious door which led back into the
haunted chambers of youth."

"Longfellow is my poetry Bible," he said. "To read
him is a liberal education. The beauty of his charac-
ter transcends everything else. Outside of the excel-
lence of his poems, his is the sweetest human mind that
ever existed."

The Argonaut was now registered among the lovers
of good books. He had made a fine start although
he was not yet beyond the luring sway of sidetracks
and bsrways. The Golden Fleece was not in sight, but
now and again he caught a glimpse of shining sum-
mits ahead. Guideposts were up and the long distance
ones were pointing vaguely through the mist to a de-
lectable goal.

"Behind the curtain's mystic fold
The glowing future lay unrolled."

CHAPTER V

OVER THE HILLS AND FAS AWAY

THE tale of the Argonaut now runs to the
romantic, up hill and down dale with a vender
of ''Standard Remedies/' Doctor S. B. McCrillus
of Anderson, Indiana, the county-seat of a neighboring
county, and the reader is invited to think happily of a
holiday spirit that was tolerant of mirth and amuse-
ment.

Doctor McCrillus was not a stranger to Greenfield.
He was cordially interested in Captain Riley, and it
is due him and the eloquent Captain to digress a mo-
ment from the regular narrative.

"Neighbor Derby, shake hands with 'Whit' Riley,
son of Reuben Riley, the Greenfield attorney,'' said the
Doctor to a farmer one day, while touring the country.
The farmer manifesting ignorance of the attorney, the
Doctor's voice instantly rose to the pitch of fervor.
"Don't you know Reuben Riley, Captain Reuben A.
Riley ? He is the most eloquent man in the state."

This was not said in jest. The Doctor had listened
to a few celebrated pioneer preachers. He had on
several occasions heard Morton, Indiana's "War Gov-
ernor," Richard Thompson, Dan Vorhees, and other
political torch-lights of his time; but "not one of them,"
said he, "can hold a candle to the eloquence of Captain
Riley. I repeat it: Reuben Riley is the most doquent
orator in the state." This may have been an exaggera-
tion, but it was not one to the Doctor. There were a

105

106 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

score of old patriots in Greenfield who said the same.
As eminent an authority as Horace Greeley, who had
heard the fluent Captain in the Fremont campaifirn» held
a similar view. The Doctor had a theory that the great-
est speeches go unrecorded. "They are traditions/'
said he, ''and several Riley speeches belong to that
class." He had heard the Captain at a memorial meet-
ing a few days after Lincoln's assassination. He re-
called the indefinable poise of the orator, the flash of
his dark eye, and the magical effect of his gestures.
The eulogy so impressed him that after the lapse of
half a lifetime he could recall the solemn images of the
occasion as they appeared "in their morning luster."
Old residents of Greenfield refer to it as the "Lost
Speech." The Doctor remembered that the eulogist
prefaced the speech with two texts, one from Cowper
and the other from the Bible ; the first —

"God moves in a mysterious way

His wonders to perform ;
He plants his footsteps in the sea.
And rides upon the storm" :

and the second, "I will make judgment the line, and
righteousness the plummet: and the hail shall sweep
away the refuge of lies and the waters shall overflow
the hiding place." "When Captain Riley spoke," added
the Doctor, "you knew God moves in a mysterious
way. You could see Him in the tempest, in the flames
pf devouring fire; you could hear Him in the earth-
quake."

One brief paragraph of the speech remains ; the re-
mainder was the gift of inspiration under the spell of
the occasion. "Never," the orator wrote on an envelope
a moment before rising to speak, "never in the history

OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY 107

of recorded time has the transition from free, exultant,
forgiving:, universal joy, been so quick, so sudden, to
universal gloom and sorrow. We rejoice with joy un-
speakable at the realized salvation of our governments
We are stricken with horror dumb, with dark fore-
bodings, ahnost with despair, at this blackest crime
against the nation — against humanity — the assassi-
nation of Abraham Lincoln."

After he had finished, the orator sat down in the
silence and wept with the crowd. He had opened the
fountains of universal sorrow. A comrade in tears re-
minded him of a battle-torn flag returned from the war,
which was to share the honors of the day. Promptly
rising to the occasion, he paid a tribute to the Stars
and Stripes that brought the audience to its feet with
enthusiasm as uncontrollable as the silence that fol-
lowed the tribute to the dead President was profound
and sorrowful.

Since the poet's grandmother Riley held the people
captive in camp-meetings, and since his father was the
peer of the most eloquent men in Indiana, it would
seem that Doctor McCrillus had ground for attributing
the poet's success on the platform to heredity. "The
poet was a descendant of speech-makers," said the
Doctor. "Never a pose before the footlights, never
a gesture or smile that could not be traced back to the
eloquence of his father."

The Doctor was a man of warm sympathies but in-
clined at times to eccentricity. His long, white
"breezy whiskers" were a part of the landscape.
As Mrs. Spottletoe would say, they were the lode-
star of his existence. "On a clear day," said Riley,
"you could see them from Hardscrabble to Point Isa^
bel." Although widely known for his quaint ways and

f.B/

108 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

''old-school oddities/' he was not an average drug ped-
ler by any means. Nor did he make average claims for
his ''Standard Remedies/' He allowed the great public
to be the judge. **His marvelous brews and concoc-
tions/' said Riley, ''relieved every form of distress
from

The pinch of tight shoes
To a dose of the bltiea.'^

Riley started out with the Doctor on the "Standard
Remedy" excursions in the summer of 1872 and con- /") '
tinued with him irregularly for two years. On the road
into Greenfield the Doctor had seen some fine
examples of sign-painting on the Fair Ground
fence, advertising the Farmer's Grocery and other
merchants of the town. While he and a young travel-
ing recruit whom he had already enlisted were stand-
ing by their wagon near the Court House, they "were
approached/' said the Doctor, "by a verdant looking
young fellow dressed in overalls, who was hunting
work. I noticed the overalls for my other sign-painter
wore loud clothes."

"Do you need a sign-painter?" he asked.

"I have one," replied the Doctor ; "there he is ; shake
hands with James McCIanahan."

But the man in overalls was in earnest. He hoped
that the outside world would yield him favors his
native town denied.

"Have you seen any of my work?" he continued.

The Doctor had not seen it

"How did you come in ?"

"By the Fair Ground/'

"Did you see some large signs there on the fence?"

"Yes/' answered the Doctor.

OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY 109

^ made them," said RO^.

The Doctor now being interested assured him he had
never seen work in that line so skilfully done, and in-
quired his name.

''James Riley/' was the reply, ''Jim Riley, they call
me round town."

"Any relation to Reuben Riley?"

"My father," answered James.

That he might consider young Rilejr's proposal a
few moments longer, the Doctor turned aside to deliver
some "Remedies" to the drug stores while the two sign-
painters began a friendship that was never broken.
Riley took his new friend to see other samples of his
work, among them the large advertising card in the
post-office. Before returning to the wagon the Doctor
went to the law office of the elder Riley, with whom
he talked a few minutes on current issues, not neglect-
ing to compliment the attorney on the "Lost Speech"
and other efforts of like nature.

^Your son James wants to travel with me," he re-
marked as he rose to go.

"My God I" cried the father, not bitterly but sorrow-
fully; "if you can make anything out of him take him
along."

For two years or more the father had been in doubt
about his son's ability to make a living. The Doctor
ventured the opinion that the son had merit "There
must be something to him," he said; "you forget; he
is the son of Reuben Riley."

This compliment pleased the father greatly, so they
quickly agreed that since the son was of age he
should be the architect of his own fortune. The com-
pact the Doctor made for the son's service was, in part,
word for word, Mrs. Jarley's agreement when she em-

no JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

ployed Little Nell to point out her wax-work figures
to the spectators. And it was "open air wagrancy/' too,
although occasionally the Doctor did exhibit his wares
in town halls, taverns and vacant store-rooms. As to
salary (readers of Dickens will remember) , Mrs. Jarley
could pledge herself to no specific sum until she had
sufiiciently tested Nell's abilities and watched her in
the performance of her duties. But board and lodging
she bound herself to provide, and she furthermore
''passed her word" that the board should always be
good in quality, and in quantity plentiful. Precisely
such an agreement the doctor made for the services
of young Riley. He promised fried chicken at farm-
houses whenever the "Remedy" show was in the neigh-
borhood of dinner bells.

"You are going with us, James," said the Doctor
as he approached the wagon ; "we have a few deliveries
to nmke; be ready when we return — ^have your Sun-
day clothes packed."

"I haven't an extra coat to my back," was the gay
reply. What did Riley care about a change of clothes
in June, when he was building a bridge into Wonder-
land?

So, a few days later, the three birds of passage
climbed to their high seats on the wagon and drove
away north on the Pendleton road, behind a glossy
span of sorrel horaes that "in their perfect beauty and
sjrmmetry, high heads and tossing manes," as Riley
characterized them years afterward, "looked as though
they were just prancing out of an Arabian dream."
Instantly," said Riley, recalling the wayfaring days,
I started on my voyage for the Golden Fleece. It
was delightful to bowl over the country. My blood ran
through me like a gulf-stream. I laughed all the time.

u
u

OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY 111

Miles and miles of somber landscapes were made bright
with merry song and when the sun shone and all the
golden summer lay spread out before me, it was
glorious. I drifted on through it like a wisp of thistle-
down, careless of how, or when, or where the wind
should anchor me/*

He was twenty-two years old, but in habit and
appearance several years younger — an original young
man, full of fire and faith but devoid of the experience
which comes from traveling. His neighbors did not
take him for a poet, although he looked out of large,
thoughtful eyes. He was compactly built, had a full
face and fair complexion, reminding one of a way-
ward college boy whose mind was on pranks instead of
books. He was generous to a fault and modest as a
girl of fifteen.

At Anderson there was a halt of three weeks to make
preparations for a lengthy excursion. The Doctor had
previously vended his "Remedies'* only in neighboring
counties. Now that he had another sign-painter, and,
as was soon discovered, a minstrel and theatrical per-
former as well, he would carry his message ta remote
districts. Anderson was to be the hub of his travels,
and, as it turned out, for a few years the rival of Green-
field in claiming the residence of the poet.

Impressions of Riley's new home on White River very
naturally crept into his letters. "Anderson," he wrote
a year or so later, "is a very handsome little town of
about five thousand inhabitants — ^good people, speaking
generally, although of course it takes all kinds of people
and so forth. Vice is not as rampant here as in days of
old. It grows weaker every day, and religion and law,
hand in hand, are fast driving it from the land. If the
city has one blight, it is its Court House. That really

112 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

looks out of place and uncomfortable, surrounded as it
is by beautiful business blocks ; and I sometimes think
it is a pity it could not attend the Old Settlers' meet-
in?, for it could go farther back than the oldest inhabi-
tant and tell of the youthful prowess of Indiana, espe-
cially of the Indian chief, Anderson, for whom the town
was named. One can almost hear the old-time war
whoop echoes lurking around in its misty, time-dimmed
architecture."

Soon after his arrival in the town, Riley designed a
special trade-mark for the 'Topular Standard Reme-
dies," a work which required three days of experiment
and ingenuity. "Your Oriental Liniment," said he to
the Doctor, "is advertised *best on earth,' and your pa-
trons must be protected against fraud and imposition.
Your circular says *good for sprains and bruises.' Add
*bee stings.' " The apiarian disorder was accordingly
listed and there resulted an increase in business.

Riley also won local recognition by painting a huge
sign on the Court House fence. Chief interest however
centered in a **hummer" — in rhyme — painted at the
comer of Meridian and Bolivar Streets, which drew
from the Weekly Herald the opinion that the "Painter
Poet" had immortalized a popular jeweler of the town.
School children repeated it trippingly :

"We would advise you all to see
The sparkling Gems and Jewelry
At John Awalt's and be content
To know your money's wisely spent
At his immense establishment."

The preparation for the "Standard Remedy" wander-
ings included a long spring wagon made in Ohio, from
which fact it received its name, the "Buckeye." The

OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY 113

wagon was equipped with buffalo robes for cool days,
and three big boxes covered with leather for protection
from rain — one box under a high seat in front and two
larger ones back of it with a small box and seat-pad on
top,

''Where the sign-painters sat
To giggle and chat —
Witii their feet high and dry
And their heads in the sky/*

For that day it was an imposing spectacle with the
Doctor's *Tt)reezy whiskers" and the merry pair of
painters back of him, their hats on one side, spinning
down "the grooves of time," behind a span of horses
sniffing the wind. Those fiery steeds possessed the vir-
tues of Bucephalus. They were as fleet as any;

**That ever cantered wild and free
Across the plains of Araby/'

Sometimes the ''Buckeye" carried a thousand dollars'
worth of "Remedies." Usually a trip consumed two
weeks and frequently covered a distance of two hun-
dred miles. One of the first midsummer excursions
led out by way of Middletown, Hagerstown and Cam-
bridge City, on down to the White River Valley, re-
puted by Riley, and artists after him, to be "the most
beautiful spot on God's earth." Another excursion led
to the northwest, through Alexandria, Elwood and Ko-
komo, to "the banks of Deer Creek." When sales were
numerous the Doctor traveled but a few miles a day.
Driving into a town he would leave two or three dozen
bottles at the drug store and soon thereafter, half a
mile out, a new sign appeared : "Go to Manaf ee's for

114 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

McCrillus Popular Remedies." He also sold to farmers
while the sigrn-painters nailed sign-boards to trees and
gate-posts. The company, preferring the farmer's hos-
pitable board to the hotels, often remained over night
in the country. Fried chicken was the rule on crisp au-
tumn days, if the poet and his chum could find one
roosting on the manger when they went out with the
farmer early in the morning to feed the stock.

Cool spring water was also the rule. Sweeter draughts
were never quaffed than those which flowed from the
mossy brim of the oaken buckets chained to the 'Veil-
sweeps'* of that time. The presence of giggling coun-
try girls always afforded merriment. The rural pic-
tures were never wanting in interest if the travelers
could stay their winding pilgrimage,

"Then go their way, remembering still
The wayside well beneath the hill."

An excursion westward led as far away as the river
counties of the Wabash. One day the Doctor became
reminiscent. Something reminded him of a rich bach-
elor he knew, who went to Illinois to buy land of a
widow, who, the bachelor discovered on reaching her
door, was the girl he had loved when she lived with his
mother on a farm in Ohio. Thus the Argonaut found
the thread of gold for a ballad, "Farmer Whipple —
Bachelor," which soon saw the light in the "Original
Poetry" column of the Greenfield News.

Riley did not travel down the river as far as Old
Vincennes, but far enough for his fancy, a few years
later, in the guise and dialect of a pedler, to canvass
the counties for a patent chum. This lively picture
from his poem, "Regardin' Terry Hut," is mainly per-
sonal experience:

OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY 115

*Tve travelled round the grand old State
Of Indiany, lots, o' late ! —
I've canvassed Crawf erdsville and sweat
Around the town o' Lafayette ;
I've saw a many a County-seat
I list to think was hard to beat :
At constant dreenage and expense
I've worked Greencastle and Vincennes —
Drapped out of Putnam into Clay,
Owen, and on down thataway
Plum into Knox, on the back-track
Fer home ag'in — and glad I'm back! —
I've saw these towns, as I say — ^but
They's none 'at beats old Terry Hut!"

It is interesting to note the poet's play of fancy
around the ''old chum." It appeared in one of his
first poems to receive eastern recognition, then en-
titled, "A Destiny," in which a farmer chased a scrap
of paper over the fence and across the field, and cap-
turing it, scratehed his head and pondered over a rhyme
and the pencil-sketch of a dairy maid under it, and then
with the complacency of ignorance saw through the
whole business of dreaming and poetry :

*1 see the p'int to the whole concern —
He's studied out a patent chum !"

Strictly speaking the chum was a sieve patented by a
'''country poetf' of Hancock County, the "corduroy
poet," Riley sometimes called him, and at other times.
Professor Startailer or the "seersucker poet." The
patentee, all aflame with the prospect of a fortune, sold
territory for the sale of the sieve, to his friends. "He
let us in on velvet," said Riley ; "a friend and I bought
two border counties near Ft. Wayne. I still have
Adams County," he laughingly averred forty years
after.

114 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

McCrillus Popular Remedies/' He also sold to farmers
while the sign-painters nailed sign-boards to trees and
gate-posts. The company, preferring the farmer's hos-
pitable board to the hotels, often remained over night
in the country. Fried chicken was the rule on crisp au-
tumn days, if the poet and his chum could find one
roosting on the manger when they went out with the
farmer early in the morning to feed the stock.

Cool spring water was also the rule. Sweeter draughts
were never quaffed than those which flowed from the
mossy brim of the oaken buckets chained to the "well-
sweeps" of that time. The presence of giggling coun-
try girls always afforded merriment. The rural pic-
tures were never wanting in interest if the travelers
could stay their winding pilgrimage,

"Then go their way, remembering still
The wayside well beneath the hill."

OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY 115

*Tve travelled round the grand old State
Of Indiany, lots, o' late ! —
I've canvassed Crawf erdsville and sweat
Around the town o' Lafayette ;
I've saw a many a County-seat
I ust to think was hard to beat :
At constant dreenage and expense
I've worked Greencastle and Vincennes —
Drapped out of Putnam into Clay,
Owen, and on down thataway
Plum into Knox, on the back-track
Fer home ag'in — and glad I'm back! —
I've saw these towns, as I say — ^but
They's none 'at beats old Terry Hut!"

It is interesting to note the poet's play of fancy
around the "old chum." It appeared in one of his
first poems to receive eastern recognition, then en-
titled, "A Destiny," in which a farmer chased a scrap
of paper over the fence and across the field, and cap-
turing it, scratehed his head and pondered over a rhyme
and the pencil-sketoh of a dairy maid under it, and then
with the complacency of ignorance saw through the
whole business of dreaming and poetry :

'1 see the p'int to the whole concern —
He's studied out a patent chum !"

118 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

Such harmony the Blue River hills had never known.
"That fellow," said a barber, whose shop was near,
"will have to stop playing or I'll have to stop shaving."
None there had heard minstrelsy half so sweet. It was
clear to them that night, as it was always clear to the
performer, that when a master "tangles his fingers in
the strings of a guitar there is an indefinable some-
thing in its tone that is not all of earth."

One week in autumn the medical troupe found itself
far away on the St. Mary's River, near the Ohio
state line. "We are going home to-day, boys," said the
Doctor. It was eighty miles, but there was something
in the speed of the sorrels that said they could make it.
Sales had been unusually good, and the Doctor had by
trading filled his boxes with dry goods, groceries and
hardware.

On that notable trip, Riley was a veritable Tom Pinch
seeking his fortune. Unlike Tom on the London coach,
he did not pass "places famous in history and fable" ;
but he witnessed new scenes. He made discoveries. He
was a spectator of nature and of men's fortunes and
how they played their parts. He saw things "as from a
common theater." That joyous ride was for years the
theme of his narrative. Although his "bump of local-
ity" was as inefficient then as it was afterward, he saw
things and remembered what he saw. John Hay was
wont to say that his vision and the vividness and accu-
racy of his memory were the secrets of his success. If
it were a question of vision (omitting the element of
place) he could trace back the eighty-mile run link by
link. His indefinite purpose added zest to it. "I was
driven by the uncertain currents of existence," he
said, "yet the novelty and uncertainty of it were posi-
tively ecstatic." Like Walter Scott, he was makin' him-

OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY 119

self a' the time but did na ken maybe what he was
about till years had passed.

They left the river at a place called The Devil's Ract
Ground. The morning was crisp and bright, and the
sorrels were homeward bound. The Doctor held the
Mnes — **eighty breezy miles were written in his very
whiskers." The sign-painters were at the top-notch
of being. As they sped onward the poet's heart "ran
riot with the Muse/' and his chum accented the pleas-
ure at every turn in the road. They were two merry
boys

"Full of fancy— full of folly-
Full of jollity and fun,
Like the South Wind and the Sun."

There was enough medley in the day (in the words of
Pope) to "make their souls dance upon a jig to
heaven." On they went, voyaging with the thistle-
down, south by west, a swift Lake Erie wind at their
backs, their cheeks flushed like winter apples, sailing
away under fleecy clouds, — ^past hedges — past country
wagons — past sinewy woodsmen — past rosy-cheeked
schoolboys — rumbling over culverts — over gurgling
streams — over the "underground railroad" — past ducks
and geese and the peacock on the sunny side of the barn-
yard— down a steep incline across the Wabash at Buena ^
Vista — round the Loblolly ^ Swampland — ^round Sugar /V/ / r ,-
Island — past prehistoric mounds — past morning-glory / ^ ic /^i ii.
vines climbing over cabin homes — past the dimpled '

cheeks of babyhood — past dog-fennel beds, gravel beds
and through spice-brush ravines on to Pennville. There
they cooled the horses' hoofs in the Salamonie, and there
the poet saw

"The hills slope as soft as the dawn down to noon
While the river ran by Uke an old fiddle-tune."

120 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

Out of town again. Mark Twain, traveling in the
stage-coach across the plains to see strange lands and
wonderful people, was not more animated. Onward
bowled the "Buckeye" past the haymakers, the new-
mown clover and the long windrows reaching like mo-
tionless waves from end to end of the field — under the
gnarled willow tree where barefooted children fought
and clung to the swing, "waitin* fer the cat to die" —
past the raising bee and the log bam springing up "at
the wagging of the fiddlestick" — ^past stake-and-rider
fences — past log huts and their stick-chimneys — from
Pennville to the Panhandle Route, where the poet saw
the "iron horse tugging away at a row of freight cars
long as Paradise Lost" — ^then down the line a mile to
Red Key to joke with the operator while a farmer
thrashed the baggage-smasher — across the track for
refreshments with the restaurant man whose luscious
viands had been the talk of the town ; where (in Riley
rhyme)

"Strawberries blushed with a rosy gleam
On islands of sugar in oceans of cream ;
And the lips of the maiden were tinged with a glow
The kiss of a lover could never bestow."

Then a detour of the Pioneer Fair, where Riley
caught a glimpse of Grandfather Squeers and the old
settlers about him, like the trees, repeating their rustic
legends to one another. But the crying babies and El-
viry at the organ awkwardly feeling her way up and
down the keys for the ''Vacant Chair" and the "Old
Camp Ground" were more than his sense of melody
could stand. The sorrels, too, were restless. It was
two o'clock and they had not reached their half-way
point. Westward-ho down the road again by the race-
track to see the "side-wheelers" pace neck and neck

TllC MOTIIF.BS GlKl.llOOD HOME ON THE MteSIBSIIIEWA

fidiiteiiSI

Standaep Remedv TBADE.UAHK
Designed by Rllej-

OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY 121

it.

Iwixt the flag and the wire'* — ^now gazing on the
purple haze that hung over the valley where the river
flowed — ^now skirting sunny glens where the bees
droned their honey-song in the golden-rods — threading
the winding seclusion of the river road — fording the
creek near the rustic bridge of Wonderland — alighting
a moment at the Indian spring for a draught

"From the old-fashioned gourd that was sweeter, by
odds,
Than the goblets of gold at the lips of the gods !"

On down the old Muncie Trail through the sumac
thickets with visions of superstitions, powwows, and
Red Men smoking the fragrant kinnik-kinnik — through
the grapevine wilderness known to the oldest inhabitant
as the feeding ground of passenger pigeons that then
as in the days of Audubon '^glided aloft in flocks and
spirally descended to sweep like the wind among the
trees''— -on through enchanted aisles

"Adown deep glades where the forest shades
Were dim as the dusk of day
On the Mississinewa/'

Magical name for Riley! Long had he cherished it
in memory as the girlhood home of his mother.

The dawn of recollection for him dated from a mem-
ory of his mother's dewy blue eyes when he stood by
her chair near their log-cottage fire while she told him
the stories of the long ago on the Mississinewa. Ten-
derly he alluded to it afterward in his poem, "Envoy" :

"Then the face of a Mother looks back, through the

mist
Of the tears that are welling ; and, lucent with light,
I see the dear smile of the lips I have kissed
As she knelt by my cradle at morning and night."

122 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

There are periods in the life of every poet when the
enjoyment of a week is narrowed down to the ecstasy
of an hour. Such an interlude was Riley's while thread-
ing the wonderland of the Mississinewa. From that
hour until midnight his heart was athrill at the ease
with which his ideas found birth and expression. The
trees were harps of melody. The very fence panels
flowed along the wayside in poetic meter. On he went

"Down the current of his dreams, gliding away
To the dim harbor of another day,"

the jingle of his rhymes keeping time with the jingle
of the bridles — past the wake of the hurricane where
"the voice of the Lord had broken the cedars" — ^through
the mellow gloom — ^through the smoke where the wood-
peckers hammered the dead limbs in the clearing — ^past
cow-bells clinking sweeter tunes than "Money Musk" —
past squadrons of wild turkeys gobbling in the woods —
past red and yellow tomatoes on the garden fence — ^past
the campaign grove where the candidate squandered his
spread-eagle rhetoric — past the Greeley flagpole with
its streamer flying to defeat — ^past bushwhackers —
past the circuit rider on his way from the basket meet-
ing— down the Bee Line racing with the "cow-catcher"
on the Accommodation Train — ^past the cider mill and
apple tree, the country frolic which drew obliging fam-
ilies together when the fruit was to be harvested — ^past
the Orchard Lands of Long Ago,

"Catching the apples' faint perfume
And mingling with it, fragrant hints of pear
And musky melon ripening somewhere."

"And then the ride," said Riley, "into the saintly twi-
light, toward the clouds in the west that hid the silver
sickle of the moon with their dusky locks. How inex-

OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY 123

pressibly divine was the drapery of the night that de-
scended upon us/' There were sparks f r(»n the horses'
hoofs as they accelerated their speed. There were mam-
moth castles and battlements across the fields, for so the
woodland shadows seemed. Then came the sudden
shower that silenced the katydids, and then the ride
through the thunder and the rain —

"And still the way was wondrous with the flash of hill

and plain —
The stars like printed asterisks — ^the moon a murky

stain/'

Eighty breezy miles — one hour as the aeroplane flies,
but sixteen for the "dazzling speed" of the sorrels.

An early poem dates back to this eighty-mile run.
The sorrels and a little thread of gold from the "En-
gineer" (a short story by Mary Hartwell in the House-
hold Magazine) prompted the "Iron Horse/' the poem
which subsequently drew a note of praise from Long-
fellow. "The engineer and his iron horse and his row
of baggage cars and passenger coaches rushed across
the land" — so ran the hint in the magazine. Driving
through the country the poet bantered the Doctor about
his sorrels, challenging him to rival the flaming steed.
"You can stir up the dust/' said he, "and shoot the
rapids at the toll-gates, but the path of my steed

Spins out behind him like a thread
Unravelled from the reel of time/'

The trip to St. Mary's River furnished suggestions
for other poems, not tiiat Riley then wrote them, but
the incidents were tucked away in memory for future
use. One more is interesting for its novelty. When
the Doctor was detained a day or more in a town, the

112 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

looks out of place and uncomfortable, surrounded as it
is by beautiful business blocks ; and I sometimes think
it is a pity it could not attend, the Old Settlers' meet-
ing, for it could go farther back than the oldest inhabi-
tant and tell of the youthful prowess of Indiana, espe-
cially of the Indian chief, Anderson, for whom the town
was named. One can almost hear the old-time war
whoop echoes lurking around in its misty, time-dimmed
architecture."

Soon after his arrival in the town, Riley designed a
special trade-mark for the ''Popular Standard Reme-
dies," a work which required three days of experiment
and ingenuity. **Your Oriental Liniment," said he to
the Doctor, "is advertised *best on earth,' and your pa-
trons must be protected against fraud and imposition.
Your circular says 'good for sprains and bruises/ Add
*bee stings.' " The apiarian disorder was accordingly
listed and there resulted an increase in business.

Riley also won local recognition by painting a huge
sign on the Court House fence. Chief interest however
centered in a 'Tiummer" — in rhyme — painted at the
comer of Meridian and Bolivar Streets, which drew
from the Weekly Herald the opinion that the "Painter
Poet" had immortalized a popular jeweler of the town.
School children repeated it trippingly :

"We would advise you all to see
The sparkling Gems and Jewelry
At John Awalt's and be content
To know your money's wisely spent
At his immense establishment."

The preparation for the "Standard Remedy" wander-
ings included a long spring wagon made in Ohio, from
which fact it received its name, the "Buckeye." The

OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY 113

wagon was equipped with buifalo robes for cool days,
and three big boxes covered with leather for protection
from rain — one box under a high seat in front and two
larger ones back of it with a small box and seat-pad on
top,

"Where the sign-painters sat
To giggle and chat —
Witti their feet high and dry;
And their heads in the sky/*

For that day it was an imposing spectacle with the
Doctor's *Tbreezy whiskers" and the merry pair of
painters back of him, their hats on one side, spinning
down "the grooves of time," behind a span of horses
sniffing the wind. Those fiery steeds possessed the vir-
tues of Bucephalus. They were as fleet as any;

'That ever cantered wild and free
Across the plains of Araby."

Sometimes the "Buckeye" carried a thousand dollars'
woi-th of "Remedies." Usually a trip consmned two
weeks and frequently covered a distance of two hun-
dred miles. One of the first midsummer excursions
led out by way of Middletown, Hagerstown and Cam-
bridge City, on down to the White River Valley, re-
puted by Riley, and artists after him, to be "the most
beautiful spot on God's earth." Another excursion led
to the northwest, through Alexandria, Elwood and Ko-
komo, to "the banks of Deer Creek." When sales were
numerous the Doctor traveled but a few miles a day.
Driving into a town he would leave two or three dozen
bottles at the drug store and soon thereafter, half a
mile out, a new sign appeared : "Go to Manaf ee's for

114 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

"Then go their way, remembering still
The wayside well beneath the hill."

OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY 115

It is interesting to note the poet's play of fancy
around the "old chum." It appeared in one of his
first poems to receive eastern recognition, then en-
titled, "A Destiny," in which a farmer chased a scrap
of paper over the fence and across the field, and cap-
turing it, scratehed his head and pondered over a rhyme
and the pencil-sketch of a dairy maid under it, and then
with the complacency of ignorance saw through the
whole business of dreaming and poetry :

'1 see the p'int to the whole concern —
He's studied out a patent chum !"

114 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

McCrillus Popular Remedies." He also sold to farmers
while the sign-i)ainters nailed sign-boards to trees and
gate-posts. The company, preferring the farmer's hos-
pitable board to the hotels, often remained over night
in the country. Fried chicken was the rule on crisp au-
tumn days, if the poet and his chum could find one
roosting on the manger when they went out with the
farmer early in the morning to feed the stock.

"Then go their way, remembering still
The wayside well beneath the hill."

OVER THE HILLS AND PAR AWAY 115

'I've travelled round the grand old State
Of Indiany, lots, o* late ! —
I've canvassed Crawf erdsville and sweat
Around the town o' Lafayette ;
I've saw a many a County-seat
I iist to think was hard to beat:
At constant dreenage and expense
I've worked Greencastle and Vincennes —
Drapped out of Putnam into Clay,
Owen, and on down thataway
Plum into Knox, on the back-track
Fer home ag'in — and glad I'm back! —
I've saw these towns, as I say — ^but
They's none 'at beats old Terry Hut!"

It is interesting to note the poet's play of fancy
around the "old chum." It appeared in one of his
first poems to receive eastern recognition, then en-
titled, "A Destiny," in which a farmer chased a scrap
of paper over the fence and across the field, and cap-
turing it, scratched his head and pondered over a rhjone
and the pencil-sketch of a dairy maid under it, and then
with the complacency of ignorance saw through the
whole business of dreaming and poetry :

*T[ see the p'int to the whole concern —
He's studied out a patent chum !"

128 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

Other echoes came from the boarding house. Riley
wrote and bound a book in the kitchen, a little book of
tea leaves, to which he gave the title, ''Nursery Rhymes
for Children/' His chum loaned it about until it was
worn to a frazzle and the rhymes lost. Friends referred
to it as his first book. An incident, more particularly
for those interested in the poet's public readings, was
the coming to the dining-room one week of an "educa-
tionist," who had been engaged to do institute work for
the Madison County teachers. He was abnormally
affected and never lost an opportunity to dilate on his
favorite topic — ^the object lesson. "Butter plates and
teaspoons/' said he primly^ "are charming illustra-
tions."

"A peanut, I suppose," said Riley across the table,
"would detract from the dignity and profundity of
the subject."

"Quite the contrary," was the return, "super-excel-
lent, a very clever suggestion,"

A few weeks after, Riley entertained a company of
friends at a private house. Among his quaint selec-
tions was "The Object Lesson," by no means the
unrivaled specimen of humor it was afterward, but the
beginning.

January, 1873, found Riley in Grant County, attract-
ing the attention of farmers, with signs on barnsides ;
one, a huge boot and shoe and a colossal figure 4 with a
picture of a man by it, advertising the Foreman Com-
pany. There were at the roadsides, too, funny signs
in rhyme for merry-makers, such as

Arnold & Gunder
For Dry Goods by Thunder.

That he was not financially successful was recorded

OVER THE HILLS AND PAR AWAY 129

in the Doctor's daybook. He had not enough money to
attend the theater. The Doctor bought the tickets for
Humpty Dumpty. 'The play," said he, *Vas a fail-
ure but Riley's comments on it were worth more than
the price of admission." The Doctor had advanced
money and merchandise for the sign-painting venture,
and the result was somewhat discouraging, as seen in
the following table:

J. W. Riley, Dr.
1873

Jan. 8. To Cash (at Marion) $ 3.00

Jan. 18. To Cash (for paint) 1.00

Jan. 24. To Cash (for paint) 1.00

Jan. 24. To white lead 1.00

Jan. 31. To order on Baums 3.00

Jan. 31. To Cash 1.00

Feb. 1. To Cash 3.00

Feb. 10. To Cash .35

Feb. 14. To Handkerchief .40

Feb. 15. To Cash 5.00

Feb. 20. To Shirt (borrowed) 1.50

^20.25
J. W. Riley, Cr.
1873 Jan. and Feb.
By painting

By Do 60 Boards ^«? 6.00

By Do 10 Boards 2.00

By Do 2 doz. tin signs 6.00

By Do sign over door 1.00

$15.00
To Dead Loss 5.25

$20.25

ISO JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

"The above," so the Doctor wrote in his diary years
after, "is James Whitcomb Riley, the Hoosier Poet of
Indiana." The "Painter Poet" was a dead loss in the
sign-painting venture, but when, a decade later, he
began to gather sheaves from the field of renown, when
the Doctor read his poem "Fame," the loss of $5.25
was a trifle quite beneath notice.

The "Hoosier Poet" borrowed a shirt for a return
trip to Greenfield, his first lengthy visit home since
the afternoon in June

. "he went rolling away

To the pea-green groves on the coast of day."

'James W. Riley" (so ran the local in the Greenfield
Democrat, February, 1873) "put in his appearance on
Saturday last. He looks well." He should look well-
He had traveled from side to side of his native state.
The excursions had taken the curves and kinks out of
his routine existence. He had health. Whoever rode
with Doctor McCrillus returned robust and vigorous.
The sorrels and the high seat on the "Buckeye" had
worked the miracle, although the Doctor attributed the
cure to "European Balsam."

In his latter years Riley was silent about his youth-
ful wanderings, yet he never ceased to remember them
with pleasure. He was so grateful that he once gave
the Doctor a "lift" in rhyme. Let no critic fancy he
thought of the jingle as poetry. The season it saw the
light was his playtime. He was playing with rhymes
as a boy plays with quoits or marbles :

"Wherever blooms of health are blown,
McCrillus Remedies are known ;
Wherever happy lives are found
You'll find his medicines around;

OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY 131

From coughs and colds and lung disease.

His patients find a sweet release.

His Oriental Liniment

Is known to fame to such extent

That orders for it emanate

From every portion of the State ;

His European Balsam, too,

Sends blessings down to me and you ;

And holds its throne from year to year

In every household far and near.

His Purifier for the Blood

Has earned a name as fair and good

As ever glistened on the page

Of any annals of the age,

And he who pants for health and ease

Should try these Standard Remedies."

CHAPTER VI

WITH THE GRAPHIC COMPANY

AS ALREADY intimated, the Argonaut did not
work exclusively for the "Standard Remedy*'
vender. He and his chum sought success in
other sign-painting fields. When voyaging alone they
were terribly tormented, like the Argonauts of ancient
time, with troublesome birds. The ugly harpies, Debt
and Failure, came to snatch away their dinner and
hamper their pursuit of the Golden Fleece.

They formed a partnership, the Riley & McClana^
han Advertising Company, and made known their pur-
pose on cards which they distributed in the towns:
''Advertise with Paint on Barns and Fences —
That's the Way." Subsequently the firm was ex-
panded, three or four partners being taken in, and
the name changed to The Graphic Company, so called
from the New York Graphic, then popular with de-
signers. The company went through the country
painting signs for clothing firms and other enterpris-
ing establishments.

One summer morning Riley was working alone, his
chum having gone a short distance away to paint at
the roadside. He felicitated himself on his good luck.
The haze was purpling the horizon wall. The Ken-
tucky warbler in the "sugar orchard" near by sang as
sweetly as he ever sang for Audubon. Even the barn-
yard fowls were tuneful. To perfect the picture, chil-
dren stood by gazing in wide-eyed bewilderment at the

132

WITH THE GRAPHIC COMPANY 133

sign as it took shape on the bamside. The sign was a
large one and the bam on which he was painting it,
exceptionally well located about a mile from town. He
was giving his faculties free reign and had the work
about half done, being overjoyed at the success of it,
when a man on horseback called to him from the road :
"Hello, there! you man on the ladder!" Riley looked
round and waited a moment for a further bit of infor-
mation.

"Get down from that ladder."

"Why?"

"Who told you to paint there?"

"The people who live here."

"Well, the people who live here rent this farm from
me. Down from that ladder and be quick about it, too."

He who gave the order was a big man on any oc-
casion, but that morning, after he had dismounted,
he stood there like a certain pen portrait of Julius
Csasar — "eighteen feet high in his sandals." Riley
remembered that the giant accomi>anied the order with
an oath. "It was the oath," said he, "that brought me
so suddenly down the ladder. I ran like a reindeer
across the field."

On reaching his chum, all was flutter and misgiving.
''What now?" asked the chum.

"Tom limb from jacket," returned Riley. "Fly!
cleave the sky! — and the devil take the hindmost."

They drove hurriedly away, and when they dis-
covered they were not pursued, Riley became calm and
related in detail his harrowing experience.

The sequel is likewise interesting. Ten years later,
after he had published his first book, after, as he re-
marked, he had "pulled the joints out of his name" so
that he was James Whitcomb instead of J. W. Riley, he

134 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

returned to the old town in Grant County to give a
public reading. He was the guest at a dinner in his
honor. As the hours wore away, he noticed the host
eying him sharply. Later in the evening, after the
ladies had retired, his host said, "Mr. Riley, it seems
to me I have seen you before; I can not remember
where ; perhaps it is my imagination, but I can not get
it out of my mind that I have met you somewhere."

Now the poet was an adept in remembering faces.
"Well," he replied, "out here a mile away — I do not
remember on which road — ^there is a bam. Once there
was a fellow who started to paint a sign on it and a
man from town — "

"Are you the fellow — my God ! You are the man I
ordered down that ladder." The confusion of the
host is readily imagined and further comment use-
less except to add that they were fast friends there-
after. The sign at the time was still unfinished.

The unfinished sign precipitated other woes. The
"Advertising Company" had no money. They had to
replenish their treasury or go to the wall. Paint tubes
and glass for fancy work required cash. In their ex-
tremity they concluded to try Howard County, and
after doing what seemed "a flourishing business" in
comparison with previous losses, they rattled across
country in an old "quailtrap" to Peru. As they ap-
proached the county-seat on the Wabash, Riley
"sparkled" with memories of an old book he had read.
He rallied his partner, half -seriously, about the Con-
quest of Peru. The royal gardens were in Peru, glit-
tering with flowers of silver — and there were the
llamas with the Golden Fleece. He and his chum were
Spaniards going to plunder the Peruvian temples,
chiefly that one in the heart of the city known as "The

WITH THE GRAPHIC COMPANY 135

Palace of Gold." They would sack the town and take
it but they would not do it by appealing to arms.
"Gold," said Riley, using the figurative language of the
Incas, "is the tears wept by the sun — ^and we may have
to weep for it. Joy or sorrow, we must have it."

Entering the town, the "Spaniards" decided to draw
first on the heartstrings of the Peruvians hoping there-
by to loosen their purse-strings. Just for the mischief
of it, Riley rubbed soap under his eyes, assumed a
mournful look and was led into the hotel as a blind
sign-painter. Seating himself in the office, his chum
went out in search of work. He soon found it and
drew up a contract for a large sign on the front of a
livery stable, the work to be done the following day by
his "blind partner." Returning to the hotel he dis-
covered a circle of curious fblks around Riley, requir-
ing, on the part of the "Advertising Company," the
utmost exercise of self-control. Many were sympa-
thizing with the "blind man" and a few were skeptical.
The confusion and uncertainty continued at the supper
table. The "helpless" man spilled gravy on the table-
cloth while his chum indicated where the dishes were.
As the meal proceeded, the waiter grew more curious
and the guests more sympathetic. Riley upset his
coffee with a trembling hand and at the same instant
dropped a saltcellar on the floor. "Look at you!"
remonstrated his chum, sharply ; "now we'll have a bill
for damages!"

Being "weary," as they said, "from a long day's
journey," they retired early. The truth was they had
to screen the transom with newspaper and lock them-
selves in their room so that their explosions of laughter
would not be detected.

After breakfast Riley was led down the street to the

136 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

livery bam. The crowd was not long gathering, rumor
of the blind sign-painter having spread during the
night from Canal Street to the Cemetery. The space
for the sign was high above the double-door entrance,
and ample. Riley was stationed on the sidewalk and told
not to move till the ladder was hoisted. With a paint
bucket '^hinged" to his side, he stepped falteringly to
the first round and climbed clumsily to the top. He
lifted his brush : "A little more to the left," said his
chum from the street below — "watch your balance —
higher — a little higher — ^there, that will do — ^proceed."

When ascending and descending the ladder as he had
to do several times, Riley would "slip" a round and
once he spilled his paint. "It was great fun," said he,
"to hear the crowd talking ; the skeptics and believers
were about equally divided."

"That fellow ain't blind."

"Yes, he is ; see his eyes."

"No, he ain't, I tell you; he's playin' off I"

"I tell you he's blind ; didn't you see him fall off the
ladder and spill his paint?"

"Mein Gottr exclaimed a Dutchman when Riley
slipped on the ladder; "I wouldn't be up dere for a
coon's age!"

The work was completed in the afternoon. The
crowd dispersed, and the "blind partner" was re-
turned to the hotel where the "Advertising Company"
retired to its room for more explosions of laughter.
What the crowd had witnessed was, in its way, as magi-
cal and unexplainable as was the work of Phidias to
the artless Greeks. It should be remembered that the
"Painter Poet" was an actor. The "performance" he
gave that day was something more than a series of
contortions or unnatural posturings. He succeeded as

WITH THE GRAPHIC COMPANY 137

well as he did with the 'lieonainie Hoax'' five years
later, or even better.

The next day Riley eluded the public and strolled up
and down the river, while his chum secured contracts.
After his '^introductorsr" to the merchants, the chum
had but to show them the sign on the livery bam. to
clinch an agreement inmiediately. Seasons of pros-
perity dated from that day, although most of them
vanished with the rapidity with which they arrived.
The Peruvians had been conquered. They gave their
gold ungrudgingly. They were happy, most of all that
sight had been restored to the "blind sign-painter"—?
glad to the core that they had been so ''deliciously hum-
bugged." "Those Spaniards," so a citizen said, "were
bundles of electricity, the queerest, brightest, cleverest
fellows that ever climbed over the Peruvian wall."

Although the blind sign-painter ruse was not re-
peated in other towns, the Peruvian method of secur-
ing business became more serviceable every day. It
was a proposal that business men advertise their shops,
stores and factories in the manner that had hitherto
been monopolized by the patent medicine men. 'That
chum of mine," said Riley, "was a great chap. I fairly
worshiped him because he was so successful and he
worshiped me because I could do the work after he
had secured the business," In selecting their victims,
they looked over the county i>aper for the* most enter-
prising dry-goods man. Then the solicitor '^med on
the current and there was music in the air for many
days." Sometimes, for diversion, he worked under an
assumed name. "Evidently," he would say to a mer-
chant, '^ou are the most wide-awake man in this town.
We have been painting advertisements on bams and
fences for a medicine firm. We know that such ad-

1S8 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

vertising is the most remunerative in the world. Once
paid for, it lasts for years. Now there are eight roads
leading out of this town. We will 'paint' you along
these roads for three miles out" — ^for so much money.

The merchant usually "squealed" at the price. Then
the solicitor drew the county paper from his pocket.
"You are paying the editor so much here per inch and
he advertises your competitor on the same page. Now
we do not take your rival. We handle one pian in one
line only. By closing a contract with us you monopolize
the eight roads. If you do not want it we will try your
competitor." The solicitor seldom failed to "bag the
game." He also succeeded with the farmers. When
desiring space for a display on their bams, he had a
way of admiring their horses and cattle. Sometimes
he would present the wife with a dress pattern that was
"very fetching."

When paid for their work the Company trod on air.
They spent their money freely, and often became
the prey of sharpers. As Riley said, they "were jay-
hawked and soon compelled to embark again on the
broad deep — ^penniless, destitute of necessities for
the voyage." If at such a season the weather became
inclement, old gaunt Starvation threatened to accom-
pany them. They waited "with anxious hearts the
dubious fate of to-morrow." Once, in the Land of the
Delawares (Delaware C!ounty) , the days were invari-
ably dreary. "It was mizzle and drizzle," said Riley;
"the week was peevish and fretful as a baby cutting
teeth." And then he broke into rhyme:

"Rain, rain, go away.
Come again some other day;
The doughty 'Spaniards' want to play
In the meadows on the hay."

WITH THE GRAPHIC COMPANY 189

When the tardy sunshine did finally dawn, they
''bounced from bed glad as boys who hear the first gun
the Fourth of July." Borrowing a horse and buggy,
and engaging to share their gross receipts with a
big-hearted stranger who furnished the white lead and
backed them for board and lodging at the hotel, they
went forth conquering and to conquer. The whole
region round the county-seat was ticketed with signs
and couplets, "Merchants, not farmers/' they were
wont to say, "were the salvation of the land. What
could plowmen do without the implement store ? How
could their daughters be happy without millinery estab-
lishments ? How .could gooseberries be sweetened with-
out sugar? How could children be educated without
the bookstore?" By such clever tactics, losses were
retrieved.

Riley was invariably congratulating himself on
"hairbreadth escapes from Old Starvation." One day
especially set apart for thanksgiving he, with other
members of the Graphic Company, was celebrating his
release with some fishermen on White River near "Mun-
cie Town." Not far away were landmarks of Red Men.
It was a romantic spot. "There," wrofe Riley, 'i;he
catfish winks his nimbly fins.

There all day long the bullfrog cheeps,
And yawns and gapes and nods and sleeps;
There the woodland rooster crows,
And no one knows what the pullet knows."

The fishermen were near a huge elm, whose trunk
inclined horizontally across the stream. Toward noon
Riley stole silently away to a farm-house for refresh-
ments, leaving his friends to wonder what had become
of him. An hour later he "mysteriously" stood on the

140 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

trunk of the tree over the river with a pail of milk in
one hand and a pie in the other. Old Starvation had
been vanquished. "I appeal to any white man/'
he began gravely, the fishermen looking up in surprise
and glee — "I appeal to any white man to say that ever
he entered Logan's cabin hungry and he gave him not
meat ; that ever he came cold and naked and he clothed
him not. For my country I rejoice at the beams of
peace. But do not harbor the thought that mine is a
joy of fear. Logan never felt fear. He will not turn
on his heel to save his life. Who is there to mourn
for Logan ? Not one !"

"Hail to the Chief," shouted his chum from the river
bank. The fishermen joined in the applause but the
Chief seemed not to hear them. All afternoon he lis-
tened to other voices. His heart was a harp in the
wind. The very trees "lifted up their leaves to shake
hands with the breeze." Rhymes rippled on as mer-
rily as the stream over the pebbles. "For a week,"
said his chum, "it was as easy to paint and jingle as
it was for birds to carol." Signs ran to rhyme :

"Sing for the Oak Tree,
The monarch of the woods:
Sing for the L — M Trees
•The dealer in dry goods."

Pegasus even bantered him to ride when passing a
spot so unlyrical as a harness shop:

"Saddles and harness ! 0 musical words,
That ring in our ears like the song of the birds I
But give to Pegasus a saddle from there.
And a poet astride, and we venture to swear
That the steed will soar up like a vulture and sing
To the clouds in the sky without flopping a wing."

"I am so happy," Riley remarked, '1 can hear the

WITH THE GRAPHIC COMPANY 141

com and melons growing.' I could climb a sycamore."
His chum, however, the Graphic Chum, as tiie reader
henceforth shall know him, had occasion for disap-
pointment. For once he had failed as a solicitor. A
farmer with a keener sense of the beautiful than his
neighbors refused to have his new bam blemished with
a sign. It was a conspicuous site — ^''could be seen,'' it
was said, ''from Pipe Creek to £j11 BucI^.'' The usual
''bribes'' offered the wife, such as a chromo or a set of
dishes or a calico dress, proved futile. The chum
painted his regret in a couplet at the roadside :

"Of all sad words of tongue or pen
The saddest are these. It might have been,"

Riley promptly following with,

"More sad are these we daily see:
It is, but hadn't ought to be,"

both couplets terminating in a parody, which Riley
wrote with apologies to Whittier, and subsequently
printed in a county paper, beginning with,

"Maud Muller worked at making hay.
And cleared her forty cents a day."

The failure to disfigure the bam had but a momen-
tary effect on Riley's buoyant spirit. All was sun-
shine and love as he passed, as is evidenced by his re-
flections in the early morning on looking out from a
window over a new town which he had entered the
night before.

"How j>leasant it all was," he wrote, "how fresh,
how clearly defined and beautiful — a picture from Na-
ture's hand framed in a halo of golden light — the
broad streets, and the houses with their cleanly washed
faces crowding together, 'toeing the mark' in proper

142 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

order, eager for the business before them; and the
voice of the milkman below, a cheery woman's voice
in response, mingled with the bow-wow of a dog and
the vague, startled exclamation of a rooster that went
to scratching up the dirt livelier than ever, carrying on
an undertone of conversation with a half dozen pullets.
And then the far-off sound of an early train whose
whistle pierced the thin air for miles and brought
recollections of the hum of busy wheels and multitudes
astir in the city far away. The birds in the woods
across the common were never so glad before, never in
such splendid tune. They breakfasted on music. They
seem£d to be too full of joy to have an appetite for
bugs.'*

Although from Peru onward it was up hill and down
dale, yet on the whole there was an increase of busi-
ness, particularly after the Argonaut and his asso-
ciates were advertised as the Graphic Company. An-
derson was the hub of their wanderings, as it had
been for the "Standard Remedy" vendings. The
"Graphics" voyaged with the current. They were

"Dragon flies that come and go,
Veer and eddy, float and flow.
Back and forth and to and fro,
As the bubbles go" —

one month, north to Kendallville ; another, west to
^rawf ordsville ; one week, out to Hagerstown ; the next,
down to Knightstown.

|i Riley had a prosperous season at South Bend the
fall of 1873. "I have been flourishing in the Stude-
baker settlement," he remarked on returning from the
town. "I ranked high with the South Benders." At
first he worked with a member of the Graphic Com-
pany. Later he was employed a few weeks by a local

WITH THE GRAPHIC COMPANY 143

house (Stockford & Blownqr) and turned out, accord-
ing to his employers, some of the most original work in
the state, "the best west of New York,** said they, "and
second to none in Chicago.*' One week inside the
shop he enjoyed "the glare and glitter of two
hundred and fifty dollars* worth of sign work.*' One
of his designs made a decided hit. Its dimensions were
astounding. For once he had ample room for the exer-
cise of his inventive faculty. It was a series of pic-
tures apparently in one — ^"The Contrast of Forty
Years** — South Bend in 1833 when a few log cabins
stood on the River St. Joe, and South Bend, the
prosperous city of 1873. Over against the pioneer
surrounded by the crude implements of his time,
stood the man of fortune surrounded by modem
conveniences. Left and right respectively, were
an ox cart and a Studebaker wagon ; a bear and a fat
cow ; a fur trading post surrounded by Indians and a
commercial emporium surrounded by pleased cus-
tomers ; a well-sweep and a gushing fountain ; a judge
holding court in a shanty by the river and a modem
stone court house ; a flatboat and a steamboat ; a board-
ing house and a big hotel; a prairie swamp and a
Brussels carpet; a stump and a cushioned rocking
chair ; an ax and a gold-headed cane ; the log hut and
the palace ; a family with no news at all and one with
books and the daily paper. "It was gigantic,** said
Riley. "South Benders were surprised to learn of their
crude beginning. It took two men a week to paint it**
At South Bend there also were rounds of social en-
joyment and participation in musical programs. There
he heard Bret Harte, who had been an inspiration to
him since the days he read him in the woods with the
Schoolmaster. The lecture renewed his interest in the

144 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

Argonauts. His twenty-fourth birthday had just
glided by. After it, he was particularly happy when
the Graphic Chum or any other member of the Com-
pany referred to him as the Forty-Niner in quest of
the Golden Fleece.

As the seasons passed, the ''Graphics'' grew more
spectacular. They were a band of roving, roistering
fellows, all young men filled with a desire to see the
world. Like Washington Irving when drifting about
Europe, all they wished was a little annual certainly
wherewith to buy bread and cheese — "they could trust
to fortune for the oil and the wine." TTie chief end
of their wanderings was amusement. Riley was a kind
of prince among them.

"To hear him snap the trigger
Of a pun, or crack a joke.
Would make them laugh and snigger
Till every button broke."

His regalia was a thing to remember. "I wore for eve-
ning dress," said he, "a tall white hat, a pair of speckled
trousers, a spectacular coat with gilt buttons, and car-
ried a cane. We made lots of money." A twenty-
dollar bill was a mammoth sum to him then. When
doing outdoor work, he did the lettering on windows,
painting the letters on the outside of the glass instead
of the inside, thus saving the necessity of tracing them
backward. He would paint on the sunny side of the
street in the heat of July till the perspiration streamed
from every pore. Fear of sunstroke never entered his
head. There were occasions when a reunion of
some sort drew people from the country. The result
was a crowd to watch the "Graphics." On special days,
for the sake of good advertising, one member of the
Company would dress in a spotless frpd^ coat and

WITH THE GRAPHIC COMPANY 145

trousers, a Derby hat, and patent leather shoes. Riley
wore overalls. Sometimes a partner would paint them
with vivid stripes and bars. Then would succeed an
Indian war dance which soon blocked the street with
spectators. However busy the rovers were, whatever
the number of contracts for work ahead, there was al-
ways time to manifest the holiday spirit. There was
a dearth of merriment when Riley was absent. His
companions hungered for his return.

"We take pleasure,'* they wrote while he was so-
journing a month in Greenfield, "in expressing to you
our appreciation of your talents and social qualities,
and desire you to make us a visit in behalf of 'Suffer-
ing Humanity.' We would respectfully solicit your
companionship for a week or so if your business will
permit a holiday of that length of time." Signed —
Very respectfully, F. H. Mack, W. J. Ethell, James
Whitmore, James McClanahan (The Original Graphic
Advertisers) .

While his advertising companions predicted a future
for Riley, average observers did not regard him as un-
usual. He was an animated form of good humor — ^but
"genius was a long way off.'* The spectators who stood
around him in little towns were not looking for that
spark of fire in the fellow who drew pictures on the
hotel register and danced with his companions as
he went down with the "gang" to the station to see
the train come in. Genius did not reside in the man
who carried Doctor Pierce's Memorandum Book in his
pocket, painted signs for the village baker, and whit-
tled and told stories in the store on rainy days. There
were evidences of sign-painting in the neighborhood of
every town from Lafayette to Ft. Wayne, but the genial
public did not consider the occupation a stepping stone

146 JAMBS WHITCOMB RILEY

to poetry. It was not to his credit that Riley was often
"dogfirrelling when he should have been daubing." All
advertisers however marked one thing : that he was no
"humbug of the brush/' and later they learned he was
no humbug of the pen. To imitate nature, they ob-
served, artists must not turn their backs on her. They
can not paint outdoor scenes indoors. Riley knew this.
"The delicacies of light and shade," he read in Christie
Johnstone, "can not be trusted to memory. The high-
est angel in the sky must have his eye upon them and
look devilish sharp, too, or he shan't paint them."

There is evidence along the way from Peru to South
Bend that the Argonaut was not in the advertising
mood all the time. The "Graphics" held him to his
agreement with difficulty. The Golden Fleece he sought
was not the almighty dollar. If they made thirty dol-
lars a day, as they did in periods of prosperity, it was
unsafe to tell him before the end of the week. If on
Thursday, for instance, he "accidently" learned that
the receipts for three days were ninety dollars he was
inclined to quit. "That's enough; let's rest." Nor
would he be driven. When his associates insisted on
work beyond what he thought was a reasonable demand
upon him, he would "hide away, loaf and write," and
appear as mysteriously as he had disappeared the week
before. It was rumored that he shared the time with
Cupid. Love (so ran the scrap in his vest pocket) ^-r

"Love is master of all arts
And puts into human hearts
The strangest things to say and do."

There was most certainly a drawing upon his heart-
strings from home. He had been reconciled to his
father. The latter had been courting, too, and at such

■■r.or;Ax's" SP^:K^II to the Fisiiebueh

■^, " M A II K • Mr I M )\V KI . I . .^ V

J. A. 1>IM>N.

H-iall i->titi ki

WILL J. ETHELL.

i> "t'LINT IIAMli.TilN'.' &
"^ Til KlUVAIMW. y

J. H. MoCLANAHAir/

HNalacMi Mmmmmmw.

]

(JUAPJIIC COMI'AXY RrsiNKss Caki)

'€

*«

.■^(^

>y^ 'AUVEfiTiSE WITH PAINl OM BABNS ANU FLNCES; N^
^^ rn ax's THK WAV.** . ' ^^X'>>.

KiLKY & McClanaiiax HrSINKSS Caui)

WITH THE GRAPHIC COMPANY 147

a season found forgiveness the easiest thing in the
world. His letter (omitting irrelevant it^ns) reads
as follows:

Greenfield, Indiana, August 27, 1873.
My Dear Boy :

You can't imagine how anxiously I have been expect-
ing a letter from you. I wait— wait— wait with anx-
ious hope — ^but no James comes home. He writes to
others but not to me ; I don't think it exactly right —
for really I think I am more anxious to hear from you
and more desirous you should come than any other.

I have as you doubtless know, another half in thje
person of a Quaker lady, who kindly welcomes you also.
She often wonders and inquires why you do not come.
I write you with your photograph and its indorsements
in my hand. It looks somewhat natural. The hair
obscures the upper part of the countenance too much ;
and the expression is somewhat sad. The indorsement
("He is dead now") I suppose is irony, for report
says you are a very lively corpse; the other ("He was
a good boy") is literal I hope. Having passed boy-
hood years, and glided into manhood, you are, I trust,
a very good and prosperous man. That other expres-
sion ("Oh, my God!") on the back of the photograph —
I do not know how to interpret that. I hope it is not an
exclamation of despair or pain, but a real reverent rec-
ognition of God, coming from the heart, and with the
certainty that He is indeed your God, and will be ever
near them that call upon Him in faith, believing.

Now, my Dear Boy, please write me frequently; let
me know how and where you are and how you are
doing — and come home as soon as your business will
allow. Believe me ever and truly

Your Father,

R. A. Riley.

When the "Graphics" sang "Hail to the Chief," there
was financial significance in the strains as well as mel-
ody. Riley had originated the big sign idea. At his

148 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

suggestion a brother of the brush, said by friends to
have been one of the most eccentric sign-painters of
his generation, painted ''the largest sign in the United
States/' on a covered bridge over White River. "It
took all the white lead in Anderson to paint it»" was
Riley's word. Newspaper notices of it appeared as
far away as Minneapolis. It caught the attention of a
well-known threshing machine company in Ohio, who
employed its designer to paint their trade-mark on the
factory — ^a f eatherless rooster on a wall sixty-five feet
high.

While his brother of the brush was painting the
trade-mark, Riley received a substantial offer from the
Howe Sewing Machine Company. He had done the
gold lettering on a few sewing machines for the com-
pany, when in Peru. The time seemed auspicious.
"Poetry to the bow-wows," said his Graphic associates.
What they desired was to see Riley reap the reward of
a growing reputation. That reward meant the loosen-
ing of purse-strings for their benefit. Riley, however,
was not in the least inclined to mass a fortune.

The period covering his sign-painting adventures was
radiant with variety. He touched merriment at all
points. One of his partners had once been a deacon
and had a letter recommending him to "the brother-
hood elsewhere as a member in good standing." Noting
with amazement the wide contrast between his con-
duct and the standard set by the church Riley advised
him to hold on to the letter. "If you ever put it in a
church," said he, "you'll never get it out."

Prior to the time his friend painted the mammoth
sign on the White River bridge, Riley related with
great glee his blind-painting experience at Peru, how Jie
had "turned hid eyes wrong side out, spilled his paint

WITH THE GRAPHIC COMPANY 149

on the ladder" and so on. "Ill go you one better some
day," said his friend, and he did — at the bridge. The
river was at the flood. A crowd of farmers and towns-
men had gathered on the banks to see the sign expand.
While painting from the top of a ladder above the mid-
dle pier, the painter suddenly slipped and fell into the
turbid waters and was borne like a porpoise down the
stream. He was an expert swimmer and, by diving
under floating driftwood, eluded the gaze of the scream-
ing crowd, passed a river-bend below and came to shoiB.
Scattered here and there in the crowd were friends
(secret participants in the ruse) who proposed to drag
the river. They had succeeded in awakening anxious
sympathy when the ''drowning man" appeared, and
arm in arm with his friends smothered his laughter
and walked away to town, leaving the crowd in utter
ignorance of his design. For a long while, say thirty
years after, there were Andersonites still living who
did not know that the ''accident" was planned and
executed by a poet and his crafty associates.

Along with amusement came hardships. Ril^ had
with manifold pleasures what he called a surplus of
disappointments. "Although I whined a great deal at
the time," said he, "these were not to be deplored
since the best rises to the top in extremity. At
Warsaw I met a contributor to a local paper
(Mr. S. B. McManus), who put spurs on my de-
termination to win recognition. I carried my poem,
'The Argonaut' in my overalls till it was a confusion
of paint spots and ragged edges. It had been declined
by every paper on the 'White Pigeon' line from Jones-
boro to Michigan. My Warsaw friend liked the poem.
The papers had accepted him and he said they would
accept me. A simple remark — it was a slender rope he

150 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

threw me ; doubtless he did not realize the encourage-
ment he gave, but it was long enough to reach the
barque of a lone soul drifting by." As Riley went on
from town to town he was cheered by the success
of men whose outlook had once been as dismal as his
own. He particularly recalled Bret Harte, how after
writing and rewriting, he had taken the prize in a
thousand-dollar short story contest. Recognition was
not an impossible thing. His poem, "The Argonaut,"
went to rags with his overalls. As he once remarked, he
"told but half the tale and lost that ; left the song for
the winds to sing." But his hopes were not wrecked.
He began to think of other poems, such as "Faith,"
"Toil," and "Some Day."

The "White Pigeon" line demanded money for trans-
portation. The Argonaut had none. At one time he
offered a pair of sleeve buttons for a railroad ticket.
As the Graphic Chum expressed it, "he was insolvent,
had not enough sugar to reach the next town." S(Hne
bitter recollections clustered round Marion. He lived
in a joyless room, had to spread newspapers on his bed
to keep out the cold. Board bills came due and there
was no money to pay them. In the coldest weather
he was what Robert Bums calls the most mortifying
picture in human life, a man seeking work and not find-
ing it. Outdoor work was impossible and indoor work
— ^there was none. He numbered a few post-ofRce boxes,
but the remuneration was not sufficient to pay lodging.
"My host," said Riley, recalling the days, "proprietor
of a little rat-trap of a hotel across the street from
the brick church, was also out at the elbows. Together
we moved furniture and all to Huntington, drove in
a wagon through the rain thirty miles — and through
the night, too; the moon was not a dazzling disk of

WITH THE GRAPHIC COMPANY 151

brilliancy nor were the stars splintered glitterings of
deUght/'

Business revived. Soon he bought a forly-dollar
overcoat and drifted down stream to meet his chum at
Wabash. He was always bringing up with the Graphic
Chum, the man of fickle fancies. He had scaled orchard
walls with him and made love to melon patches ;

"Through the darkness and the dawn
They had journeyed on and on —
From Celina to La Crosse —
From possession unto loss —
Seeking still from day to day
For the Lands of Where-Away."

They were the Siamese Twins of the sign-painting bus-
iness, "who had rolled in the game from the time their
happy remembrance began." At Wabash they made
such a favorable impression on the chief merchant of
the town that he proposed to send them to the country
to seek work in his family carriage. **We can't use
that carriage,'* remonstrated the chum, "the paint will
splash it." "Then we'll go without paint," said Riley;
"not every day can sign-painters afford a carriage."

"Nothing can come from nothing." So Reynolds, the
painter to the king, had said in the "British Book." "In
vain," he wrote, "painters or poets endeavor to invent
without materials on which the mind may work, and
from which invention must originate." The Argonaut
acted on the suggestion at every turn in the road. He
was getting an education. As if sign-painting and
many other occupations of those years were insufficient,
he joined a baseball club. He did not play — ^"served
as a catcher one afternoon only." He did, however, con-
ceive the idea of getting together the "crack players"
of the county. He pitted the "Andersons" against

152 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

the "Muncies." From this came his "Benson Out-Ben-
soned,'' an inferior prose sketch printed later in a
county paper, but chiefly remembered for the part it
played in an early lecture failure.

He was acquiring material — ^f rom books as well as
from men and affairs. To the ''Graphics'' he was a
mine of quotation. ''Keep to the right— quote poetry
about that if you dare/' said one of them as they were
traveling a country road. Instantly the Argonaut re-
peated the old English Quatrain:

'The Law of the Road is a paradox quite,

In riding or driving along :
If you go to the left you are sure to go right ;
If you go to the right, you go wrong" —

a muddle that was strikingly illustrative of incidents
throughout the poet's life. Over and over things he
started to do went wrong. The simplest efforts often
ended in complexities.

'The pranks men play live after them." So Rilqr
mused one day while riding on the "Buckeye" with the
Standard Remedy vender, who had just received a
sharp note from a preacher in a Dunkard settlement.
"There is a sign out here," wrote the preacher, "that
shocks the neighborhood." The Graphic Company, in-
cluding one whose name was Ethell, had painted a
sign near the Dunkard settlement and had subscribed
their names as usual. With a simple twist of the
brush, Riley obscured the first two letters in Ethell
and capitalized the third, so the signature read,
Riley, McClanahan & Hell. This was not done to
discredit Ethell, who was one of the most blame-
less men of the Company. As a farmer remarked,
"It was simply the prank of a prankish poet." The
sign was changed and the preacher's wrath softened*

WITH THE GRAPHIC COMPANY 158

but not before the "Graphics" and "Standard Remedies
had suffered injury. Talebearers had been busy. Pious
farmers, passing and repassinsr the sign, had retailed
the scandal. In due time the good people of the neigh*
borhood began to talk about the "Hell Company." A
circuit rider, observing the mischievous conduct of the
members of the Company around the tavern and de-
ploring their improvident use of money, remarked that
the reproachful name contained more truth than poetry.
Riley sings of the joy and pathos of that vagrant
time in "Dave Field." Field had shared the happy-go-
lucky experience up and down the old "White Pigeon"
railroad :

'Xet me write you a rune or rhyme

For the sake of the past that we knew,
.When we were vagrants along the road,
Yet glad as the skies were blue.

"Let me chant you a strain

Of those indolent days of ours.
With our chairs a-tilt at the wayside inn
And our backs in the woodland flowers^

"Let me drone you a dream of the world

And the glory it held for us —
With your pencil-and-canvas dreams
And I with my pencil thus.

"A sigh for the dawn long dead and gone,

And a laugh for the dawn concealed,
As bravely a while we still toil along
To the topmost hill, Dave Field."

So many poems are traceable to the restless excur-
sions of the Graphic period that it seems ungracious
to berate it They interpret Rile/s life amiss who

154 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

deplore those pleasures and hardships. Whatever may
be said of his wanderings and the temptations and
delinquencies occasioned by them, the fact is that he
regarded them a part of his education. The voice of
the "wanderlust" had in it the ring of authority. He
answered it — and the reward was the experience his
genius required.

One should look with kindly eye upon his first in-
clination to be a sign-painter, prompted by his reading
the Life of George Morland. Of all sketches in the
"British Books/' Morland's life was, to Riley, the most
fascinating. Morland's career had "the sharp sword
of necessity at its back.*' The youthful Riley sat with
him among sailors, rustics, and fishermen while the
roof tree rang with laughter and song ; he called to the
drivers of the coaches; he hallooed to the gentle-
men of the whip; he rode the saddle horses from
the White Lion Livery and went all in a quiver
when the artist painted signs. The rapidity of his
work surpassed comprehension. As time elapsed Riley
manifested some of Morland's characteristics. Like
him he became a roving sign-painter, and at times a
dispenser of conviviality. Like him he seemed to
I)ossess two minds — one, the animated soul of genius
by which he rose to fame and made himself victorious
over many ills of life ; and the other, "a groveling pro-
pensity," which in his youthful days sought persistently
to wreck his fortune and condemn him to the gaiety
and folly of dissipation.

Re-reading the book, Riley noticed Morland's orig-
inality— his style end conception were his own — ^he
was always natural — ^he found things to charm the eye
in the commonest occurrence— he was a painter for

WITH THE GRAPHIC COMPANY 166

the people, all the people, the good and the bad, the
rich and the poor. "Morland's name was on every lip/'
he remarked in an after time ; ''painting was as natural
to him as language ; he opened his heart to the multi-
tude. The mistake he made was not in going among
the reptiles, for such his associates of low degree were
called, the mistake he made was in lowering his conduct
to the level of their debauchery. He had to see them.
Did he not paint four thousand pictures? It was
genius to make the pictures ; it was not genius to de-
light in degradation."

Moralists have claimed that Riley should not have
read Morland's Life. There were homes in Greenfield
where the book was forbidden. The fact, however,
remains that Riley repeatedly read the book and never
expressed a syllable of regret for having done so. An-
other thing equally significant is the fact that although
he was fascinated with the book, he never wasted his
young manhood in the wild, imprudent manner of the
British artist.

When older, Riley always made it clear that a poet
had to know the people before he could write verse for
the people. He had to be bewildered with living before
he could write "A Ballad from April." After he had
found *'b, man for breakfast," as tiie phrase ran, after
he had mingled with the section gang and had seen an
Irish mother weep over the mangled form of her
son, after he had signed the pledge, talked Temperance
and worked right and left in the ''blue ribbon move-
ment," then he could write "Tom Johnson's Quit."

Here in Riley's erratic days, as in the lives of so
many men eminent in art and literature, is the ques-
tion of the wheat and the tares, the intermingling

156 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

of good and evil. Ruskin cites the instance of
an artist, not only tolerating but delighting in the
disorder of the lower streets of London, "the web of
his work wrought with vices too singular to be for-
given/' yet enough virtue and beauty left in him to
make him ''supreme in the poetry of landscape/' great
and good qualities sufficient to make him the ''Shakes-
peare of painting/' In all genius, some one sagely
observes, there is a touch of chaos, a strain of the
vagabond ; and the admirers of genius in all ages, and
particularly the friends of poets have avoided many
erroneous and damaging conclusions by remembering
fhisfax^t.

On the whole then, friends of literature are not to
deplore the Graphic days. They are to rejoice that
Riley

Roved the rounds of pleasures through.
And tasted each as it pleased him to/'

Hiey are to smile when

"He joined old songs and the clink and din.
Of the revelers at the banquet hall.

And tripped his feet where the violin
Spun its waltz for the carnival/'

They are to be glad, though it is more difficull^ '

"That he toiled away for a weary while.
Through day's dull glare and night's deep gloom ;
That many a long and lonesome mile
He paced in the round of his dismal room ;
That he fared on hunger — and drunk of pain
As the drouthy earth might drink of rain.

WITH THE GRAPHIC COMPANY 157

"So fhe Argcmaut came safe from doom.
Back at last to his lonely room.
Filled with its treasure of -work to do
And radiant with the light and bloom
Of the summer sun and his glad soul, too!^-
Came to his work with tuneful words
Sweet and divine as the song of the birds/'

CHAPTER VII

WHILE THE MUSICIAN PLAYED

THE reader is now to consider another phase of
a restless life, which in point of years blends
with the emplojnnent of time in si^-painting.
The Argonaut has joined himself to a band of home
companions. His excursions are musical and confined
chiefly to the streets and highways of his home county.
His joyous occasions suggest a season of May-time
when he crowded years into a few brief months. The
nights were long, deep and beautiful, chiefly the "silent
afternoons of the night,'* as he so finely wrote, "when
the heavens poured down upon him their mellow wine
of glory.'* He painted signs by day and reveled in
music by night. "With the fiddle and the flute,*'
said one of his home friends, "he and his companions
drifted out under the stars and laid the pipes for popu-
larity with the girls.** It was the season of sweet sing-
ing voices, as he wrote in a fragment on "A Tune** —

"Sweet as the tune that drips
From minstrel finger-tips

That twang the strings
Of sweet guitars in June
At midnight, when the moon

In silence sings.**

Life was a dancing medley and heartily Riley re-
sponded to its charms as did other young men of the
town. He heard the tinkle and drip of the music that

158

WHILE THE MUSICIAN PLAYED 159

they heard, but his heart was also responsive to melo-
dies they did not hear. While sharing the charms of
rollicking society, his thought also floated

"Out on the waves that break
In crests of song on the shoreless deep
Where hearts neither wake nor sleep."

His love of music developed early. There was
rhjrthm in the rock of the cradle. Unlike Whittier who
knew little of music and could scarcely distinguish one
tune from another, Riley reveled in "the concord of
sweet sounds.*' As he grew older he could repeat any
air after once hearing it. At the age of five he heard a
violin for the first time at a neighbor's house where
children had gathered to listen to a country musi-
cian. The sensation was delicious ; the child caught his
breath as children do in woodland swings. "He danced
on the steps," said his mother, "in an ungovernable
spasm of delight." The prattle of childhood was blent

"With the watery jingle of pans and spoons,
And the motherly chirrup of glad content,
And neighborly gossip and merriment,
And old-time fiddle tunes,"

as the poet happily sang in A Child-World. Then
followed his boyish interest in the band wagons that
glittered with a splendor all their own while he marched
with boys of high and low degree in circus-day parades.
He had visions of a time when he should travel with a
circus and dangle his feet before admiring thousands
from the back seat of a golden chariot. A little later,
at the age of twelve he was charmed with the music
of the Saxhorn Band, the old Greenfield organization
that marched away to the war in 1861. A serenade
at the farther edge of town one midnight before their

160 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

going, awakened in the youthful Riley heart a rap-
ture undefined. Few lads would have lain

''So still in bed
They could hear the locust blossoms dropping on the
shed."

In his school-days Riley often took more interest in
drawing and music than in his books. There was a pic-
ture in his geography of a herdsman lassoing wild
horses on the pampas of South America. Riley drew
in place of the lasso, a guitar, with which the rider
was beating a horse over the head. "The guitar is a
light instrument," he once remarked, "but that was
not giving it light treatment. The horseman wore a
gaily colored scarf, which reminded me of a Spanish
cavalier, and that suggested the guitar."

What dreamy visions ranged over the "arch of crea-
tion" in those callow days of youth. The old National
Roady blossoming with its "romance of snowy cara-
vans" ran like a pageant through the town. Along with
its ox-carts, its Conestoga wagons and chiming bells, it
brought the unriddled mysteries of music and love.
"Bright-eyed, plump, delicious looking girls" were not
strangers to Greenfield and the long highway that bi-
sected the town.

Lovers and poets, according to John Hay, are prone
to describe the ladies of their love as airy and delicate
in structure, so angelic that the flowers they tread upon
are greatly improved in health and spirit by the
process. The girls who traveled the National Road
were not of this ethereal type. Nevertheless they were
beautiful. "Their hair rippled carelessly over their
shoulders/' said Riley, "and many were graceful as
quails." An emigrant with his wife and daughter came

WHILE THE MUSICIAN PLAYED 161

slowly westward on the Road one sultry evening and
camped on the common, the "village green" at the
edge of town near the Riley homestead. The arrival
of a charming maiden just ten years old, who could
play an accordion and sing, was an event and the
budding Riley knew it. Her stay was brief, the family
"dropping into night again," westward bound to the
land beyond the Wabash. But she had remained long
enough to teach him how to play the instrument — long
enough to become his "first love." She also is credited
with being the original of the poem, "The Old Wish,"
suggested by a falling star. When he became a man,
Riley remembered himself as the callow lad in love
with the little "accordion wonder." "Brief but beau-
tiful," he said,

"For my wild heart had wished for the unending
Devotion of the little maid of nine —
And that the girl-heart, with the woman's blending
Might be forever mine."

The "village green" was the trysting place a few
years later for another musical episode. In those days
he did not leave home to find answers to his dreams.
They floated to him from distant lands, from the dawn
and the unknown — and he was happy. "I was not no-
madic then," he remarked when older, pleasantly allud-
ing to a merry strain in a McGuffey Reader,

"Quite contented with my state,
I did envy not the great ;
Since true pleasure may be seen
On a cheerful village green."

Out of that primitive train of old-fashioned wagons
on the National Road there drifted one May morning
a "prairie schooner" with a family from New Eng-

162 JAMES WHITCOMB EILEY

land. It was a long wintry way they had traveled.
The horses having dwindled to the ghost of a team, the
family halted on the "green" and christened their an-
chorage "Camp Necessity." It turned out that they re-
mained for the summer, renting two rooms with a time-
worn portico in front where morning-glory vines
climbed up the trellis to smile at hollyhocks on the
gravel walk. There was a musical daughter in the
family, who was known to her new friends as "Anna
Mayflower," to celebrate her native Yankee State and
the month of her arrival in Greenfield. Her winsome
manners and her guitar soon drew a circle of young
folks around her. Ere long Riley came, first to take
lessons on the guitar — ^and later, lessons in love. One
autumn evening as he approached the gravel walk he
heard music of a doleful character —

"The long, long weary day
Has passed in tears away,
And I am weeping.
My lone watch keeping."

"Why that melancholy wail?" he asked on entering
her door.

"I am going away."

"Away? — ^where — ^to Sugar Creek?"

"No— to the Great North Woods."

"Promise me," said he, "you'll never sing that dirge
again" — and so far as the lover knew, she kept her
word.

The next week the transients were westward bound
again, and the lad and lassie were "weeping — their lone
watch keeping." Letters were numerous between
Greenfield and the North Woods and tradition has it
that they were love letters. Time passed, a few years
only, and the music of his soul found expression in

WHILE THE MUSICIAN PLAYED 163

words. Caressing his recollections of "Camp Neces-
ity'* and the portico (which for the sake of meter he
changed to "balcony"), he wrote "The Old Guitar,"
cherishing the while

"A smile for a lovely face
That came with the memory
Of a flower-and-perf ume-haunted place
And a moonlit balcony."

The sequel was an incident that touched his heart
tenderly. After the guitar had moldered into decay
and the old airs had become pulseless, long after the
poet's heart had been bruised by the Bludgeon of
Fate, long after "Anna Mayflower's" address had been
lost and forgotten, there drifted to his desk one day in
the city a letter from the Michigan woods, just as
twenty years before the author of it — a maiden of six-
teen— had drifted into Greenfield. The maiden was a
mother now. She and her children were rejoicing that
Fame had come down the National Road and found
two books — Rhymes of Childhood and Afterwhiles —
"two books," she wrote, "that will survive the wrecks
of type and time — ^two books that will live

'As long as the heart has passions;
As long as life has woes.' "

When about twenty years old Riley began to think
seriously of becoming a musical performer. "I coop-
ered on the banjo, bass viol, piano and organ," said he,
recalling the musical days ; "I could play on anjrthing
from a hand-organ up to credulity. I started out with
a flageolet. You know that remarkable instrument. It
has a goitre in the neck, and swells up like a cobra de
capello. You play into one end of it and the performer
is often as greatly surprised at the output as the

164 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

hearers." Those were the sleepless days for his neigh-
bors. They

"Hopelessly asked why the boy with the horn
And its horrible havoc had ever been born."

"He was the plague of the streets," said a Greenfield
resident ; "when he played on the porch, the neighbors
went in and closed their doors and windows." He
could sing, too, especially songs in dialect, although,
according to his own opinion, the chief thing about his
voice was that it gave variety rather than pleasure. He
had friends however kind enough to say his singing
was alone worth the price of admission. He was ama-
teurish enough to thrum such old favorites as "Twenty
Years Ago," "Old Kentucky Home," "Rocked in the
Cradle of the Deep," and "Come Where My Love Lies
Dreaming." He twanged comic songs on the banjo,
indeed, wrote two or three himself, the idea literally
creeping into his mind that he might some day be a
character-song man and compose his own selections.
Although possessed of ear, taste and genius, he had
neither the inclination nor the persistence to learn the
notes. Like Gainsborough he took his first step, but
the second was out of his reach and the summit unat-
tainable. "I don't read music," he said, "but I know
the dash and swing of the pen that rained it on the
page." No one could so certainly as he detect it in
the sound

"Of dim sweet singing voices, interwound
With purl of flute and subtle twang of string
Strained through the lattice where the roses cling."

The one thing his musical years have to offer is
variety. Reading between the lines, one discovers that
the purpose of the Muse was the education of her child.

WHILE THE MUSICIAN PLAYED 165

She would have him climb by failures, by experience,
by slow degrees. In her eyes the waste basket was as
essential as the "Poet's Comer*' in the weekly paper.
She was content if in a hundred lines she could find one
crystal, knowing that as her favorite grew to maturity
the crytals would increase.

"When the Fates," it has been observed, "will that
something should come to pass, they send forth a million
little circumstances to clear and prepare the way."
The Fates decreed that Riley should not be a musician,
but it took some time to bring him round to that con-
clusion. One of the little circumstances was an acci-
dent while he and a few companions were driving to a
village to take part in a musical progranr. A special
feature of the evening was "an original poem" by the
"Distinguished Poet of Center Township." It was a
raw, snowy day. They drove a mule to a "jumper-"
sled, an animal that was as perverse and unreliable as
the wind. "The mule," said Riley, "scared at an ob-
ject in the tanyard, ran off and recklessly distributed
our musical instruments along the road. like Brom
Bones, we met the devil. My friends found me bruised
and unconscious, in a heap astride the 'bull-fiddle' in
a fence corner. Fate was trying to tell me I was not
to be a musician."

The original poem, "Joe Biggsbjr's Proposal," was
the hit of the evening although it made young Riley
as nervous as the lover he tried to depict, who in
reality was none other than himself. "It's about a
fellow," he read,

"About a fellow that both of us knows —
It might be Thomas or John —
The awkwardest fellow, we'll just suppose,
That ever tiie sun shone on ;

166 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

So awkward he stumbled and fell in love
With a most pretty girl at that,
With a voice as sweet as a turtledove
And eyes as black as my hat" —

in all, twelve stanzas about his lady-love, which the
'^Distinguished Poet" subsequently consigned to the
waste basket.

It was in those caroling days that he made his d^but
as a bass drummer in a brass band. "You should
have seen him abuse a base drum," remarked a band
member. He soon hammered himself into the enviable
position of snare drummer, and in the Greeley cam-
paign became a regular member of the band — the Green-
field Cornet Band, succeeded by the Adelphian Band,
to which he gave the name, and "two removes," said
he, "from the old Saxhorn Band of the war days," (so
named from the band instruments which bore the cele-
brated Saxhorn label). Technically, the Cornet Band
was superior, due largely to the interest Riley awak-
ened in good music. "A poor brass band," he re-
marked, "away from home one day can do more damage
to a town than twenty enterprising citizens of that
place can repair in ten years." He was an irregular
member of the Adelphian Band and "glad of it," he
said, "for when the notes came due for their extrava-
gant band wagon, the creditor could not reach me by
le2:al proceedings. Pay a band note? I did not have
enough money to liquidate a notary fee." It was with
difficulty that the Adelphians saved their wagon from
the sheriff's hammer.

A solace for the Adelphian boys in those insolvent
days was a huge marble cake with three pieces espe-
cially wrapped in fancy paper for the "Poet." The
cake was the gift of sweethearts, who thus expressed

WHILE THE MUSICIAN PLAYED 167

to their lovers their gratitude for a "joy ride" in the
new band wagon. Contrary to the ladies' expectation,
the Muse was languid. "Oh, Muse !" the "Poet** wrote,

"Inspire our Taber No. 2'
To dull itself, at least, with something new;
Command it hence at Fancy's Fate to chapper
On Three Graces in a paper wrapper.

"The pleasures manifold of this sweet feast
Would fill a dozen pages at the least.
But, Ladies, we'll inflict you with but one —
With trifling change we quote from Tennyson :
It 'gentler on digestive organ lies
Than tired eyelids on tired eyes.'
For this entendra you will please excuse
A blunt lead pencil and a drowsy Muse."

The country "joy ride" afforded an enlivening ex-
perience. While the band boys with their sweethearts
were on their way to a Blue River town a storm befell.
As Riley remarked, "Old Jupiter Pluvius took part in
the performance. The rain beginning to vex the fields,
the contents of the band wagon were crowded into a
barn, and held there a whole rainy day." As usual,
when merriment was required, the Adelphians drew on
Riley's fertility of resources. Recalling that the scene
in Hogarth's Strolling Actresses was laid in a bam,
fitted up like a theater, he resolved to assemble a simi-
lar company of performers, not for the amusement of
mankind, but for the pleasure of a community on Old
Brandy wine. He improvised a kind of rural opera and,
barring the half-dressed figures on the old English
playbill, it bore some resemblance to Hogarth's The
Devil to Pay in Heaven. Instead of ancient deities
for dramatis personae, he had the Adelphians and their

168 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

sweethearts and he saw to it especially that no damsel
should represent the "Tragic Muse."

After feasting on a picnic dinner, the players cleared
the bam floor and opened their "Country Drama" with
a polka as joyous and wild as the music that struck
wonder and applause to the hearts of "The Jolly Beg-
gars," the whole company dancing to the comet, violin,
guitar and violincello.

"Wi quaffing and laughing,
They ranted and they sang;
Wi jumping and thumping,
The vera girdle rang."

Then it was a fandango, a hornpipe, a quadrille, a
charade, or masquerade — anything to end the day in a
carnival of enjoyment. The Adelphians were not want-
ing in powers of invention, particularly if accompanied
by their sweethearts. The program was both musical
and theatrical. That night, after the storm, when the
moon rose out of the woods to flood the bam floor with
light and tangle her beams with dancing feet the Muse
found another thread of gold for the Golden Fleece.
She was not drowsy in "The Last Waltz" :—

"What happiness we had.
When that last waltz went mad
And wailed so wildly sad —

So weirdly sweet —
It seemed some silver tune
Unraveled from the moon
And trailed, that night of June,

Beneath our feet!

"A marriage of glad hands —
A gleam of silken bands —
A storm of loosened strands —
A whirling sea. —

WHILE THE MUSICIAN PLAYED 169

The broken breath — ^the rush
Of swift sweet words — ^the flush
Of closed lids — and the hush
Of ecstasy !

"O'LoveM 0 long delight!

0 music of that night !
The seasons in their flight

Have not been false;
The arms that held you then,
Enfold you now as when

1 kissed you, first of men.
In that last waltz."

War Bamett, a member of the old Saxhorn Band,
recalled that Riley's efforts to play on musical instru-
ments lacked the patience of persistence. The Adel-
phians, however, marking Riley's enthusiasm a few
years later, noted a beautiful exception — his love of
the guitar and the violin, chiefly the violin. Leaning
over his instrument, the hope in his heart grew
sweeter than songs without words. Just as Longfellow
embodied the spirit of poetry in the majesty of the sea,
the everlasting hills, and the ever-shifting beauty of
the seasons, so Riley embodied the spirit of music in
objects of simple interest and love, in the old-time
fiddler, in the robin teetering on the bough, in a merry
boy at play, in the maiden tripping through the meadow
grass. "Tilt the Cup," he besought the hunter boy,

'Tilt the cup
Of your silver bugle up.
And like wine pour out for me
All your limpid melody !
Pouch your happy lips and blare
Music's kisses everywhere.
Wave o'er forest, field and town
Tufts of tune like thistledown.
And in mists of song divine
Fill this violin of mine."

170 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

His desire to play on the violin was quickened into
a passion at the age of nineteen. He read stories and
legends of Ole Bull, the Master Musician, "who lived
in the ideal world, whose language was not speech, but
song/' To Riley the great Norwegian was a modem
Orpheus. Birds came out of the tiiickets, and
dancing streams stayed their onward feet. A fairy
throng of elves and spirits whirled in wild delight
around him (so he read in Longfellow) and mingled
with these were

"Screams of sea-birds in their flight,
And the tumult of the wind at night."

Ole Bull's violin, too, was the magical harp of gold.
The pine and maple from which it was made had
rocked and wrestled with the wind in the Tyrolean
forest, on the Italian side of the Alps, where sunshine
and sea infused melody into the trees. There was
something also in the folk-type of the Norwegian land
similar to that of Hoosierland. The people were ani-
mated, enthusiastic and practical — "a curious com-
bination," it was said, "of the prosaic and the ideal."
Such a combination made Norway rich in men of
genius as like conditions have since produced like re-
sults in Indiana.

To hear Ole Bull and to see his violin became a
fixed purpose. "I would walk fifty miles," said Riley,
"to see the diamonds in his bow."

Although Riley was forty years the junior of Ole
Bull there was a striking similarity in their lives. The
ruling passion of each was an abiding love of home
country. The poetry in its scenery and the native
merit of the people took hold of each from childhood.
That of 2Iorway was reflected in Ole Bull's style of play-

WHILE THE MUSICIAN PLAYED 171

ing and gave to his selections the charm of originality
that never failed to captivate his audience just as the
rustic beauty and simplicity of Indiana were afterward
reflected in the ballads and public readings of the poet.
"Eagerly I devoured all myths, popular melodies, folk-
tales and ballads — ^these made my music," said Ole
Bull. He is a short-sighted student indeed who can
not find a similar influence in the development of the
Hoosier Poet.

Stories of Ole Bull were in the air and the effect
was to stimulate Riley's enthusiasm to hear him, to
the point of determination. There was then no life of
the Norwegian. "We'll write one,*' said Riley. He
prepared a sketch which he carried about in his "reti-
cule" and later laid away for safe keeping in a trunk.
"I did not need the sketch," said he, "to quicken a pas-
sion for music. I already had that. What I needed was
assurance and hope. If Ole Bull had wrought great
things from humble beginnings, perhaps I could. He
was self-taught. He played his own pieces. Coming
under the influence of Paganini in Paris, he definitely
adopted the career of a violinist. I was hopeful enough
— call it a foolish dream, if you will — ^to believe a like
fortune would attend me."

To Riley there was something alluring in the Ole
Bull testimonials. Many were printed in western
papers, "a rattling good one," said he, "by George
William Curtis," who had lifted the master violinist
to a pedestal beside that of Jenny Lind. "Critics,"
said Curtis, "might dash their heads against Ole Bull
at leisure, the public heart would follow him with ap-
plause because he played upon its strings as upon those
of the violin. His nature sympathized with the mass
of men. He was so full of life and overflowing with

172 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY:

vigror that he would impart that sympathy at all
hazards/'

There was "a darling tribute" by Lydia Maria Child.
"Ole Bull played four strings at once," she wrote. "The
notes were tripping and fairy-like as the song of Ariel.
He made his violin sing with a flute-like voice, .and
accompany itself with a guitar, gentle and musical as
the drops of the rain. How he did it I know as little
as I know how the sun shines, or the spring brings
out its blossoms."

Such language to the heart of youth was electrical.
The purpose to hear the master violinist became a con-
suming fire. Twice Ole Bull came to large cities of the
West, but they were too far away. Riley had not yet
solved the problems of dress and long distance trans-
portation. "His old friend. Poverty," said an Adel-
phian, "was sticking closer to him than a brother. He
still enjoyed the luxury of borrowed clothing; and the
misfits, or tightfits, worn sometimes with a Greeley
plug, reminded us of a dandy. Silver and gold he had
none. All he had to offer was poetry." Happily he did
not have to ride a long distance to hear the Master.

The winter and spring of 1872 was for Indianapolis
a season of platform kings. Wendell Phillips came in
January to talk on "Courts and Jails." He was fol-
lowed by J. G. Holland on "The Social Undertow," and
he by Josh Billings on "What I Know about Hotels."
Then came Robert Collyer with "The Personality and
Blunders of Great Genius," and Mark Twain with
"Passages from Roughing It." All these Riley passed
by.

One day when all things were feeling the tonic of
the spring, the following announcement appeared un-
der "Amusements" in the Indianapolis Daily Sentinel:

WHILE THE MUSICIAN PLAYED 173

Academy op Music

the world-renowned violinist

OLE BULL

(Assisted by Eminent Artists)

IN GRAND CONCERT

Tuesday Evening, April 16 (1872)

To Riley the announcement was like the south wind
blowing over spring flowers. Outwardly he was happy,
but "inwardly,** said he, "my life had been a bleak De-
cember. Something was tugging away at the core of
existence and I did not know what it was. I only knew
that the mystery of it meant misery to me." His soul
was burning within him. He was peering into the
darkness, like the author of the "Raven," wondering,
fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever
dared to dream before. He was yearning for some
knowledge of his mission.

At the Academy of Music, however, the "misery of
existence" faded. 'Tieaning forward to catch the first
strains from the harp of gold," said Riley, "I was glad
as a lover among the sheaves of harvest meadows.
In imagination I saw Ole Bull behind the curtain draw
his violin from its ebon case, tune and hold it close to
his breast, poising the bow in his outstretched hand
like a magician's wand. I could almost squeeze fra-
grance from the tunes before the curtain was rolled
up." It did not matter to Riley that he had an in-
ferior seat. What did he care? Ole Bull had sold his
last shirt to hear Paganini, and had been content
with a seat in the topmost gallery in Paris to hear
Malibran.

At last the golden moment came. There on a Hoosier
stage the rapt Musician stood, the silver of sixly win-

174 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

ters on his brow, the dew of youth in his heart, — stood
there just as Longfellow had said:

"Blue-eyed, his aspect blithe,
His figure tall and straight and lithe,
And every feature of his face
Revealing his Norwegian grace ;
A radiance streaming from within.
Around his eyes and forehead beamed, —
The Angel with the violin.
Painted by Raphael, he seemedJ

All that Longfellow had said of the Norwegian was
only a faint reflex of what he was. His soul was in
his music. The violin talked for him. He played it
because he loved it. Riley's own interpretation of the
hour, a memory written years after, was brief, but
charged with feeling :

'*Why it was music the way he stood.
So grand was the poise of the head and so
Full was the figure of majesty ! —
One heard with the eyes, as a deaf man would.
And with all sense brimmed to the overflow
With tears of anguish and ecstasy.'*

He played "A Fantasie on Lily Dale," "The Car-
nival of Venice," and "My Old Kentucky Home"
with variations. Chief interest centered in "The
Mother's Prayer" which was played and heard with the
deepest emotion. What seemed so miraculous was the
discovery that the extraordinary man played the most
difficult selections "with the ease of a common fiddler
playing a jig or hornpipe." And such sustained per-
fection— ^he played three or four parts without a hint
of discordant note. Occasionally his music was ca-
pricious; as some said, "he resorted to tricks with his
instrument," but never for an instant was it wanting

WHILE THE MUSICIAN PLAYED 175

in the poetry of his interpretations. The performance
was a combination of strength and love and ''that/'
said Riley, ''makes a miracle any time in any land/'
He played as if he had just found a violin, played as
Emerson said he played in Boston — ^"the sleep of Egypt
on his lips/'

The criticism Riley particularly emphasized was
that Ole Bull's music "went to the heart of the musi-
cally ignorant and carried the educated by storm" —
just as his own public readings were destined to do in
the famous afterwhiles. He felt like calling the grand
old artist "the only violinist/' The encores (the "Last
Rose of Summer/' "The Nightingale/' and "Home,
Sw'eet Home") were inexpressibly lovely. " *The Ar-
kansas Traveler,' " said the reporter, "was played with
such rollicking abandon that the audience broke all re-
straint and drowned the sound of the instrument with
applause. A happier audience never left the Academy
of Music/' Riley went out "feeling that something
beautiful had passed that way — something more beau-
tiful than an3rthing else, like the dream of dawn or the
silence of sundown/'

He returned to Greenfield — as he said — ^"a gentleman
of good family and great expectations." He was flushed
and exultant. "Music was the climax of the soul/' The
great violinist was the sole object of his thoughts. "Did
you meet him?" asked his friends. *'Why should I?"
was the prompt rejoinder. "You don't have to shake
hands with a man to know him. Don't you know how
friends are made ? Fellowship exists whether we meet
or not. I have known Ole Bull all my life." Leaving
some of the wiseacres to doubt his sanity, he hastened
to his room. He drew the Ole Bull "Sketch" from his
"reticule" and read it again. His resolution to be a vio-

176 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

linist had received such impetus that nothing* — ^to his
way of thinking — could break it. *'Hope told a flat-
tering tale." She pointed out the resemblance in his
life to the early struggles of Ole Bull for recognition.
Similarity ran back to childhood. There was no prom-
ise for Ole Bull in the schoolroom as there had
been none for "Bud'* Riley. "Take to your fiddle
in earnest, my boy," the old Norway rector had
said; "don't waste your time in school." Ole Bull's
genius refused positively to go into a straight jacket.
How had he learned to play? God had taught him —
it was said — ^by a process as simple as that of the mock-
ing bird. When a child he had seen in a meadow a
delicate bluebell swinging in the wind ; in his fancy he
heard it ring while the soft voices of the waving grass
accompanied it. "I know what he heard," said Riley,
and so promptly did he accent the value of his opinion
by relating incidents in his own experience, that lovers
of the beautiful never for an instant doubted his word.
After the immediate enthusiasm over the concert had
subsided, Riley bethought himself of the road to suc-
cess. He went back of Ole Bull to Paganini for a
motto which he narrowed down to "Work, solitude and
prayer." In the "British Books," excellence in paint-
ing and sculpture was chiefly the result of incessant
application and he was convinced that music demanded
like concentration. With Ole Bull and Paganini it
meant practice twelve hours a day. Neverthe-
less, he was not intimidated. He would sound the possi-
bilities of music, and to this end he played on every
violin he could borrow. When the owner declined
to let him take it away from the house, he remained
and played in the kitchen. To use his own words

WHILE THE MUSICIAN PLAYED 177

he "even accepted invitations to canter over the
strings while dancing feet jarred the chinaware
and windowpanes/* Friends rem^iber that he
leaned lovingly over the violin and that the strains were
lyrically sweet. "There was a room in the old Dunbar
House in Greenfield/' said an Adelphian, "where he
played hour by hour to drown discordant sounds such
as the grist-mill, egg-beaters, and the rattle of the
street." To such he opposed "Home, Sweet Home,"
"The Cottage by the Sea," and "The Suwannee River"
with variations of his own improvising. Ole Bull had
composed his own music and he would do the same.

Thus he practised and thus he forecast his future
in the musical world with prospect of reward when he
was sorrowfully confronted with the result of an acci-
dent, which, trivial as it seems, can not be overlooked
since it actually did turn and alter his career, as trifles
frequently do in this world, where a gnat, according
to Thackeray, often plays a greater part than an ele-
phant, where a mole-hill can upset an empire. "Great
God!" exclaimed the old Greenfield Commercial, "on
what a slender thread hang everlasting things !" The
accident was a caprice of the wind. The Commercial
further observed that winds are bom to be capricious.
They ramble at will among trees and poets

"And love and cherish and bless to-day
What to-morrow they ruthlessly throw away."

What the wind really did — ^to say it curtly — ^was to
slam a door on Riley's thumb. "The wind was mad,"
said he, "stark, staring mad ; running over and around
town, howling and whooping like a maniac."

At first the injury was not considered serious, al-
though he had to dress it daily and carry his hand in

178 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

a sling. But when afterward be devoted time daily to
the violin, the wounded finger complained, the pain
increasing as he increased the hours of practice. One
night, all alone, it was sadly borne in upon him that he
was not to be a violinist, "You say a short thumb is
a little thing," he once remarked. "I say it is a big
thing — ^it was then." When he fully realized he could
never grip the violin as he had seen the Master Musi-
cian do, the sense of disappointment was akin to that
which would come over a man were some familiar
mountain-top to sink suddenly and forever from sight.
Riley was more sensitive than many of his con-
temporaries* What others suffered lightly he suffered
keenly. It was destiny's way of making him a poet —
to him then a heavy-laden, shadowy way. A French-
man remarked with a smile, that the whole face of the
world would probably have been changed had Cleo-
patra's nose been shorter. "That remark should not
provoke a smile," said Riley. "The sage should have
said it with gravity; it was the truth. Walter Scott,
when a child, sprained his foot. Ivanhoe and the other
Waverley novels were dependent on that sprain. Had
Scott not been lame he would have gone into the army.
The gates of great events swing on small hinges."

Only the few who despise the day of small things
will smile at Riley's grief. The many will share it,
for reasons made clear to them by turning-points in
their own lives. They will perceive what has been
often observed, that defects are made useful to men.
Ignorant of ourselves, Shakespeare tells us, we often
beg our own harms, which the wise powers deny us
for our good. Subsequently when Riley began doing
his life work with the pen, he saw that the angel of
adversity had denied him the realization of one dream

JAMEB WHITCOMB SILEY

Age twenty -two

OLK ItVU., TlIK Mastkk Mukuian
From [ilKitubTuph ItiU'.v c-iirrUtl iia a uiuseot

WHILE THE MUSICIAN PLAYED 179

that she might bless him with the fulfilhnent of a
greater. Obedient to the angel's prompting, he wrote
his popular poem, ^'Kissing the Rod/' Ever after, his
letters to sorrowing friends harmonized with the mes-
sage of that poem. "No mortal condition," he once
wrote, "is better than the one God seems to weigh you
down with. In my ovm case I am coming every day to
see clearer the gracious uses of adversity. — Simply it
is not adversity. — It is the very kindest— tenderest —
most loving and most helpful touch of the hand Divine.''

Though yielding to the decree of fate, Riley's in-
terest in music never abated. The man who held that
painting is the poetry of color, sculpture the poetry of
form, and music the poetry of sound, could not at any
time of his career be far from the heart of the musical
world. His debt to great composers was always ac-
knowledged. For years after the concert he idolized
Ole Bull, and carried his photograph in his "reticule"
on reading tours as an omen of good fortune. No one
understood better than he the love of Ole Bull for his
instrument. When he escaped from a burning
boat on the Ohio, Riley was "happy as a hummingbird."
The picture of the Master hugging his violin as he ap-
proached the Kentucky bank of the river was never
effaced from Riley's memory. "I would have thrown
up my hands," said he, relating the story to a railroad
conductor, "but Ole Bull was a Norseman; he had
courage. If ever you have a wreck and find in the
debris the unidentified body of a man with a fiddle in
his arms, bury it without further inquiry as the re-
mains of Ole Bull."

In those days of "strange pale glamour," although
the Argonaut did not see it, he was, nevertheless, as-
cending more rapidly than he dreamed to the niche he

180 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

was destined to fill. Cromwell was not a poet, but he
gave to the inscrutable ways of destiny a poetic inter-
pretation when he remarked that one "never mounts
so high as when he know» not whither he is mount-
ing/'

CHAPTER Vm

ATTORNEY AT LAW

THAT the Hoosier Poet ever seriously thought of
groping among the technicalities of the law for
the Golden Fleece seems to lovers of verse unbe-
lievable. They are aware (according to the myth)
that there was a wild sea to sail over, dragons to fight
and gods to assauge before the hero could bring the
Fleece home ; but for an Argonaut of the poetic order
to pommel felons in court and be pommeled by oppos-
ing lawyers seems a perversion of gifts. Riley did not
practise law, but he had friends who were bent on his
doing so.

As has been seen, his first ambition was to be a baker.
At the age of five his joy was complete when he could
fashion a custard pie. His father, however, desired
him to be a lawyer and that desire preceded the ambi-
tion to be a baker. It was another one of those erro-
neous paternal dreams of a profession for a gifted son.
To enumerate them would make a book: — Schiller
forced to study law till his dislike for it approached
absolute disgust. Longfellow, writing his father that
the legal coat would not fit him and the father insisting
that he wear it. ''Nature," said the son, "did not de-
sign me for the bar, or the pulpit, or the dissecting
room.** The father of Ole Bull striving to make a law-
yer of a violinist, and Lowell's father exacting a prom-
ise from his son that he would "quit writing poetry
and go to work.*' For twenty years Reuben Riley

181

182 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

dreamed of the law for his son Whitcomb. He dressed
the boy in a blue coat and trousers, and carried him to
the old log court house, lifted him to a seat in a win-
dow, and was overjoyed when his brother attorneys
poked the little fellow in the ribs and called him ''Judge
Riley.*' The son tells of the* incident in his own inimi-
table way: "A peculiar man was my father. About
the third thing I remember was that he made my first
suit of clothes. I was three years old at the time — ^too
young, in fact, to be taken out of pinafores, but my
father insisted that I should have a pair of pants. My
mother protested, but father would have his way. He
stepped off quietly to a store and bought the cloth with-
out saying a word. Then he cut out the suit and made
it with his own hands. The coat was a marvel of art.
Imagine it, a little three-year-old with long pants, a vest
with a red back and buckle, and cut like a man's. Then
he took me day after day to the courtroom where at
that impressionable age I saw many people with many
eccentricities. Imagine the queer figure I must have
cut among them with my hair white as milk and my face
freckled as a guinea egg."

"It was my father's ambition," Riley remarked on
another occasion, "to make me a lawyer, and I struggled
to satisfy his wishes; but bless you, that profession
was not my bent. I could not learn the stuff fast enough
to forget it." The jumble in his mind was accented by
the confusion of tongues in the courtroom. Attorneys
might see wisdom in the proceedings but to him all was
"dense with stupidity." The charge of a rural justice
to the jurymen (a story Riley sometimes repeated)
illustrates his confusion: "Gentlemen, if you believe
what the counsel for the plaintiff says, you will find for
the plaintiff. If you believe what the counsel for the

ATTORNEY AT LAW 183

defendant says, you will find for the defendant But if,
like me, you believe neither the counsel for the plaintiff
nor the counsel for the defendant, the Lord only knows
^at you will find."

Riley in a courtroom was an illustration of Schiller's
story of Pegasus at the cart and the plow. Nature does
not design poets for such employment. But give them
range for the exercise of their genius, as Schiller points
out, and they will rise kingly, unfold the splendor of
their wings and soar toward heaven. What had Riley to
do with the wilderness of code and precedent?

'In the nice sharp quillets of the law.
Good faith ! he was no wiser than a daw/'

Washington Irving was an adept in the profession com-
pared with Riley. A friend, referring to Irving's ad-
mission to the bar, remarked that ''he knows a little
law.*' "Make it stronger," said the attorney — "dam
little." What a farce, Riley, in substance, once observed
(drawling the quotation from a favorite novel),
a bench-leg poet among members of the bar,
tripping one another up on slippery precedents,
groping knee-deep in technicalities, running their
goat-hair and horse-hair warded heads against walls
of words, and making a pretense of equity with
serious faces; think of me in a fog of bills, cross-bills,
answers, rejoinders, injunctions, affidavits, issues, ref-
erences and reports — ^think of me floundering in a
courtroom with that mountain of costly nonsense piled
before me!

To Riley the law seemed a device to pull wires, an
effort to dodge, evade and prevaricate — ^"the suppres-
sion of truth, a juggling with justice." It was the devil
take the attorney. As a brother poet expressed it :

184 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

**Here lies John Shaw
Attorney at law.

And when he died

The devil cried.
Give us your paw
John Shaw
Attorney at law.**

'The epitaph contained more truth than humor*' —
such was Riley's caustic opinion when in an intolerant
mood. "The law will never help the race," he was wont
to repeat, "till it hangs men, not for what they do, but
for what they are."

**The civil law," screamed Martin Luther, ''good
God! what a wilderness it is become!" 'Tifark the
words," added Riley, when he read them; "there is a
call for house cleaning when a preacher exclaims
against it. You can't get truth by cross-examination.
An attorney can curl you up on the witness stand like
a burnt boot."

Thus he would go on till some of his friends in the
profession would hit back. "Stop your flings at the
law," said a notary; "in one week I have seen enough
in the life of an author to shame the devil in his palm-
iest days !"

"So we plow along," returned Riley, "so we wag
through the world, half the time on foot and the other
half walking."

"He never studied law," said one of Rilejr's early
friends. In a sense, that is true. He read but he never
studied. He lost interest when he discovered that
"Blackstone would not rhyme with Minnesinger." He
was never admitted to the bar; he, of course, never
had a client. "My chief asset," he once moaned, "con-
sisted of hopes for the future — and hopeless they

ATTORNEY AT LAW 185

were, I saw myself dwarfed and poor as Daniel
Quilp, my office like his, a little dingy box on a
side street in Tailholt, with nothing in it but an old
rickety desk and two wood blocks for chairs, a hat-peg,
an ancient almanac, an inkstand with no ink, and the
stump of one pen, and an old clock with the minute
hand twisted off for a toothpick."

*'He never studied law!" The following anecdote
seems to confirm the observation : When making a new
book, Riley sometimes sent out a ferret for fugitive
poems. While serving him in this capacity, a stenog-
rapher, searching through the old files of a newspaper
found the poem, 'To the Judge," which the poet had
entirely forgotten — could not recall that he ever wrote
it. Two lines of one stanza (as printed) ran as fol-
lows:

"Can't you arrange to come down?
Pigrouhole Blackstone and Kent!"

'Tigrouhole ! Pigrouhole !" repeated Riley. ''Who is
Pigrouhole? I was a May-day failure at the law, I
know, but I ought to know who Pigrouhole is." He
looked in an English cyclopedia, thinking Pigrouhole
was a contemporary of Blackstone. Then he searched
a French dictionary, thinking the barrister with the
vexatious name might be a Frenchman. At night he
called in a lawyer friend. "You are an attorney," said
he; "tell me who Pigrouhole is." "Let me see the
lines," said his friend, puzzled over the strange name.
He read them a second time —

"Can't you arrange to come down ?
Pigrouhole Blackstone and Kent! —
Can't you forget you're a Judge
And put by your dolorous frown
And tan your wan face in the smile of a friend —
Can't you arrange to come down?"

186 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

*'You mean pigeonhole/' said his friend ; **your word is
a verb. Read your poem — you are asking the Judge,
the friend of your youth, to quit the dust of the town
for the country.'*

'*Let us pray/' added Riley.

The only time Riley ever had "a case in court," he
was both defendant and counsel for defendant. It was
a farce but deserves a place in his annals for its saving
grace of humor. Sometime prior to his study of Black-
stone, while returning in a band wagon from a concert,
a dispute arose with one of the band boys which ended,
said one of them, "in a fair display of courage
and violence." His antagonist turned upon him with
such scurrilous terms as "thief" and "liar." "I could
lick you for saying that," said Riley, "if I could spare
the time." It turned out that he had to spare the time.
In the scuffle which followed, he pitched his foe out of
the wagon. The poet recalls the incident in his lines
on "The Strange Young Man." For obvious reasons
he calls the wagon a "jumper"-sled, and disguises him-
self in the chap with the dyed mustache,

"Who got whipped twice for the things he said
To the fellows that told him his hair was red."

The offense being a sweet morsel for the town marshal,
Riley was accused of "assault and battery" and brought
before the Mayor for trial. The defendant asked for
jury trial, and six "law-abiding freeholders" were
selected to decide his fate. He chose for counsel an
eccentric young fellow of the county, who had been
established in a pretentious looking office with a new
library, by his father, a wealthy farmer. The father
had placed money to his son's credit in the bank and
told him "to cut loose." The "Squire" (for so his
cronies called him) like the defendant was short on

ATTORNEY AT LAW 187

clients as well as knowledge of the law. Riley's was
his first case — and his last.

At the trial the spectators consisted chiefly of the
"Squire's" friends (so called), loafers around his
office, who for some time had dreamed of getting their
money's worth from his hour of confusion. When
the lank and lean "Squire" appeared with his arms full
of law books, they gave him their full measure of ap-
plause, which was promptly met with the Mayor's
threat to "clear the galleries" if repeated. After wit-
nesses had been examined and counsel for plaintiff had
finished, the "Squire" rose to make his maiden speech.
"While he was getting himself together for the great-
est effort of his life," said one of the cronies, "Riley
rose before the jury and began the argument," He
reversed the situation, made the "Squire" the defend-
ant and himself the counsel.

"Sit down," said the "Squire," pulling Riley by the
arm ; "sit down ; I'm your lawyer."

"Never mind, *Squire,' " returned Riley soothingly ;
"be calm ; I'll clear you all right." Turning again to
the jury, Riley was "about to lay the wreath of praise
on an untarnished name," when the "Squire" stepped
before him more imperative than ever — "Sit down,"
repeated the "Squire," "sit down — ^you're crazy!"

Your honor," said Riley, addressing the Mayor,
I do not make a business of insanity. If I did, you
would not let me run at large in the streets of Green-
field." Turning to the "Squire," he was more vehe-
ment: "Sir, your imputation of lunacy I spurn with
loathing. Though American bom, the blood of Wallace
and Bruce runs in my veins ;

*And if thou said'st I am not peer
To any lord in Scotland here.
Lowland or Highland, far or near.
Lord Angus, thou hast lied !' ''

188 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

Contrary to all expectations, the "Squire" sat down.
Riley continued, deftly directing the thought of his
hearers to himself as culprit and defendant: ''My
Lords and Gentlemen/' (turning to the jury) "we have
arrived at this awful crisis ;

'Absent thee from felicity awhile.
In this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
To hear my story,' "

Having bowed to the jury, he made a pretense of
addressing them at lengtii by recalling the court lan-
guage of Sampson Brass in Old Cwrioaity Shop. "It
is my duly, sirs," he said, smiling roguishly, "in the
position in which I stand, and as an honorable member
of the legal profession — ^the first profession in this
country, sirs, or in any other country, or in any of the
planets that shine above us at night and are supposed
to be inhabitated — ^it is my duty, sirs, as an honorable
member of that profession to throw a little light on a
disagreeable phase of civilization. I would offer some
reflections," he continued solemnly, "on the poor crab-
tree of human nature, its weakness and the difficulties
attending its obedience to moral perceptions." But
scarcely had he launched his argument when, the whole
scene ending in an uproar of laughter, the Mayor dis-
missed the case and cleared the room.

The poet's **lyre'' of after years, Bill Nye, was con-
vinced this story of "Pegasus in court" was not a tradi-
tion, "not by a mile," said he, "and a Dutch mile at
that. How do I know? Because Riley is so provokingly
silent about it. Mention it and he is as dignified as
the king of clubs ; he is as grave as the private ceme-
tery of a deaf and dumb asylum."

Riley entered his father's law office in the spring and

ATTORNEY AT LAW 189

remained until September, 1875. He gave the law a
second trial the year following, "but that," he said, "did
not count." It counted for literature however, as will
be seen in a subsequent chapter. Not all the time was
devoted to law books — "those inexpressive looking
books," as Dickens told him, "that never had anything
to say for themselves." An hour or two each day he
studied the figures of rhetoric, punctuation and
prosody, as taught in Harvey's Grwmnuir. "As to
SjOitax," said he, "there was nothing to it. I soon dis-
covered that metaphor and hyperbole were my long
suit. Prosody was a barren waste — dactyls, spondees,
iambics and trochaics the acme of confusion. Measure
and rhythm I had by nature — ^the names I did not
need." What was more significant was the new inter-
pretation he attached to a familiar quotation, one he
had sometimes seen on the blackboard in the school-
room. The hour had arrived to put it in practice. He
began seriously to think for himself:

• . • • "One good idea
But known to be his own —
Better than a thousand gleaned
From fields by others sown."

In July the law student's meditations were seriously
and tragically interrupted. A negro was captured in
the woods near Blue River, brought to Greenfield
and hung in the Fair Ground. Riley was not
one of the mob but was persuaded the next morning
to go out and see the body. "I would give a United
States mint," he said, "to efface tiiat picture from my
memory. Reynolds was persuaded by Boswell to at-
tend the execution of a robber at Newgate. The people
criticized him — and rightly. What has art or poetry

190 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

to do with the murder of a human being!" To
make the lesson doubly impressive, Riley went on to
recall the hanging of an outlaw in the Red Buck coun-
try and how an editor had "duly reported it all and
sounded a note of warning," as told by Bret Harte.
"But the beauty of that mid-summer morning," Harte
had added, "the blessed amity of earth and air and sky,
the awakened life of the free woods and hills, the joy-
ous renewal and promise of Nature, and above all, the
infinite Serenity that thrilled through each, — ^that was
not reported, as not being a part of the social lesson."
To Riley's way of thinking, "laws were too
frequently made to trap the innocent." The gen-
tlemen of the courts, as he saw it,, were work-
ing at the wrong end of the problem. "Let the jail go
the way of the dungeon. Give men better food; give
them better guides, better fathers and mothers, better
homes when lying in their cradles." Nor could the
people fold their arms under the plea of innocence.
"Like Paul," he said, "they stand by, consenting to the
death." This view so tragically wrought upon him
in those sticdent days was later expressed in "His
Mother," a poem he thought Boards of Pardon and
others interested in penal institutions had strangely
overlooked. Briefly the thought in it is this: The
Law takes the life of a wayward boy for a brutal
offense, the mother comes for her dead — ^her own son,

"God's free gift to her alone
Sanctified by motherhood.

"I come not with downward eyes,
To plead for him shamedly, —
God did not apologize
When He gave the boy to me."

ATTORNEY AT LAW 191

Thus in anguish the mother cries out against the "red-
handed" crime of the state. Since the Law has killed
both mother and son, how will it face the Judge of all
the earth in the Hereafter?

"For days/' said Riley, recalling the gloom, 'the
memory of the lynching hung over the law office like
a London fog." His native town had trampled without
remorse upon a mother's love — ^the most sacred and
precious emotion in life. "A London fog!" he moaned.
''The bewildering stages of the law and the staggering
roar of human beings when they turn their fury into
the screech of the mob — ^w'y, a London fog is but mist
over a frog pond compared to that!" There was fog
everywhere, fog up and down Brandjrwine, fog on the
lowlands and on the heights, fog creeping through the
houses, fog above the church steeples, fog in the eyes
and hearts and minds of men, fog on the prospect of
human improvement. It was the outcry of outraged
feeling, the pang of despair — and it lasted for a fort-
night after the lynching. Then succeeded a period of
unrest. As the weeks wore away the law stvdent
began to sigh again for the unhackneyed existence of
outdoor life, something wild and full of adventure. He
was ready to spread his sails wherever any vagrant
breeze might carry him. ''Would that woes might
end," he murmured,

'That life might be all poetry
And weariness a name."

Indoor employment brought a decline in health. The
doctors said he could, not live unless he got more sun-
shine. Friends advised him to travel. "They might
as well," said he, "have advised me to promote a rail-
road. I couldn't buy a ticket to the counly line." A

192 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

few wiseacres said, "Stick to the law ; it will bring you
wealth and fame" ; but health was not to be weighed in
the balance with profit from a profession.

''Health, it beats wealth ;
And what will fame profit us
I When the same comes to us

In our sarcophagus ?"

CHAPTER IX

WITH THE WIZARD OIL COMPANY

ROMANTIC history in all times has its legends
of wandering heroes who delight to make their
beds under starry skies. Again and again they
beguile the roadsides and airy heights with a scanty
supply of provisions and an inexhaustible stock
of ballads and songs. They follow "the traveling
mountains of the sky." Their hearts respond wildly
to the "Song of the Road" -

"For one and all, or high or low,
Will lead them where they wish to go ;
And one and all go night and day
Over the hills and far away."

The zestful "Song" was in the air over Green-
field the last week of summer, 1875. Pegasus,
lean, thirsty and hungry, had been unhitched from
the post in front of the law office. The gipsy
spirit was abroad. There were calls from Fort-
ville, Pendleton, Middletown, Newcastle, Farmland,
Winchester, Union City, and towns in Ohio, and the
law student was eager to answer them. The Argo-
nautic propensity returned — ^the desire to wrestle with
the ways of the world and give his fancy range in new
lands. He literally longed to have no settled place of
abode, to live and wander about from place to place,
sleeping at night in bams or at the roadside. Nature
intended him to be a vagabond. If the worst came to

193

194 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

the worst, he, like Washington Irving, could turn
stroller and pick up a living along the highways.

''Humanity in its developing stage/' an early friend
wrote him, "is a good deal like yeast — ^liable to bubble
up and boil over without giving you warning." He
was in the bubbling stage. The hour had come to go-
he was resolved on flight But how fly? Fancies are
free — ^but fares cost money.

"It is my opinion," said Riley, recurring to those
days, "that the ways for our feet are found — not made.
We strut about like peacocks and boast of our achieve-
ments and fame;

Is it by man's wisdom that the hawk soaretfa,
And stretcheth her wings toward the south?

There I was in Greenfleld, hVm as the zenith over my
head, no money, no way to leave town except walk,
and right out on the National Road the dust was flying
and the fates fashioning my way of escape. Down
that road came the Wizard Oil Company, a band of
musicians and comedians in a traveling chariot drawn
by horses that cantered and ran as if they were bal-
lasted with quicksilver. The manager of the company
had discharged a man at Knightstown. I took the va-
cant place, mounted to a seat beside the manager and
bowled away to Fortville."

The company, hailing from Lima, Ohio, had been an
annual visitor to Greenfield since 1870. The local
Adelphian Band had caught the theatrical spirit and
gone straight to the hearts of Greenfielders with an
original number entitled "The Wizard Oil Man." The
"Wizards" had mingled freely with Greenfield musi-
cians, sometimes helping out in serenades and playing
at socials and church entertainments. They usually

WITH THE WIZARD OIL COMPANY 195

appeared fha week of the Fair, but Riley had no assur-
ance that they would reappear in 1875. "All was
hanging," he remarked, "on what the wind said"

Lovers of their native heath may be inclined to re-
proach Riley for leaving Greenfield with such glee.
Truth to tell, never before nor afterward did he leave
with such satisfaction. He was sick in body but also
sick at hearty He was a fugitive from the "London
fog." Before leaving he went to bid a chum good-by,
"Quit the town," said he half seriously; "stay here
and they'll swing you to a tree in the Fair Ground."
But the joys of the road soon restored his spirits to a
hopeful view of the human species. Within two weeks
his affection for the old town was as warm as ever.

Before he reached Fortville he was in a roguish
vein. He was one of "the jolly party of chirping vaga-
bonds." The Wizard Company gave him a brimming
welcome, "smiled all round in a gust of friendship,"
glad to roam the country with such a merry-maker,
"He waded immediately," said one of the comedians,
"boot-top deep into our affections. We laughed at his
stories; everybody humored him, everybody bet on
him." Before nightfall his heart was running riot
with pleasure as in the "Standard Remedy" days three
years before. He "snapped at verse as ravenously as
if he were a crafty lawyer nipping the unguarded ad-
mission of a witness." His talk was in superlatives.
Like Stevenson, he proclaimed himself a bird of Para-
dise. He was lured forward and backward by an un-
bridled imagination. He shared the destiny of all the
living — ^he chased his favorite phantom. The highway
fairly scintillated with jingle.

Feigning he was a thousand miles from home and
calling back down the dusty road to a resident of his

196 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

native town, who had just swished by the wagon like
a "highway comet," he craved a special favor:

"If you ever live to see
The sunny town of Greenfield — ^take a message there

for me.
Take a message and a token to some distant friends of

mine,
For I was born at Greenfield, the year of Forty-nine."

At Pendleton he came from a barber shop with:

"Greenfield barbers cut my hair
And Pendleton and Hewitt—
But none kin cut it anywhere
Like Fortville Frank kin do it."

Near Newcastle, passing a bareheaded camper at the
roadside who was curling his mustache before a
broken mirror, he tossed his nomadic brother a sam-
ple of his dialect —

"I washed my face and combed my hair
Keerf ully over the bald place there ;
Put on a collar — fixed up some.
And went to church — I did — ^by gum !"

Pausing a moment near the site of an old trading
point where tradition said Red Men had been burnt at
the stake, he mourned their fate. However they had
not died in vain. It was something that comedians
could stand on mother earth where the Red martyrs
had perished,

"Where from their ashes may be made
The violets of their native land."

It was great joy to pen capricious lines. Great pleas-
ure, too, to make pencil sketches, a row of sunflowers
for instance, "chinning the fence" like happy children
at the roadside.

WITH THE WIZARD OIL COMPANY 197

Driving right and left over undulating counties with
September skies above — ^it was like a cruise on a bil-
lowy sea. Fairy isles were ever looming up mistily
in the far-away. The Argonaut was steeped in an
atmosphere of dreams — -"such gracious intervals for
reflection/' he remarked of the time, "such endless
hours of languor/' He was a lover fanned by the
warm winds of the deep-^

"And so we glide
Careless of wave or wind.
Or change of any kind,
Or turn of any tide.

Where shall we land?"

After a cruise of two weeks he landed at Union City,
on the state line, "a fussy old-hen-of-a-town," he
wrote two years later, "clucking over its little brood
of railroads, as though worried to see them running
over the line, and bristling with the importance of its
charge.'' The inunediate view of the place was almost
entirely concealed from him by a big square-faced hotel
— not an attractive town although it had "one division
of the Sons of Temperance, one factory, two news-
papers, two banks, two hotels, three lodges, five
churches and nine dry goods stores and groceries."
Notwithstanding its unsightly appearance, Union City
promptly took a seat in the family circle of Riley an-
nals. Here, within a few weeks "in the rear of the
spacious and brightly illuminated store, Bower's Em-
porium," he found material for his most popular sketch
in prose, "A Remarkable Man."

On arrival, he immediately took time to answer a
letter from his Greenfield chum, J. J. Skinner, who of
all the friends left behind was the one most likely to
send good news from home. His friend was not living

198 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

on "the shadowy side of the street.*' The letter, omit-
ting ''foreign items/' is Rile/s own account of the
two-weeks' outing:

Union City, Sept. 14, 1875.
Dear John :

We have just driven in here and it is good in finding
your letter in waiting for me. It is full of news "and
that of the very best." I am having first rate times
considering the boys I am with. They, you know, are
hardly my kind, but they are pleasant and agreeable
and with Doctor Townsend for sensible talk occasion-
ally, I have really a happy time. We sing along the
road when we tire of talking, and when we tire of
that and the scenery, we lay ourselves along the seats
and dream the happy hours away as blissfully as the
time honored baby in the sugar trough. I shall not
attempt an explicit description of all that I have passed
through, but will give a brief outline. We "struck**
Fortville first, as you already know — stayed over night
and came near dying of loneliness. There is where I
"squeeled" on street business, that is, that portion of
it where I was expected to bruise the bass drum. Well,
I have been "in clover** ever since, and do what I
please and when I please. I made myself thoroughly
solid with "Doxy** (the plajrful patronymic I have
given the Doctor) by introducing a blackboard system
of advertising which promises to be the best card out.
I have two boards about three feet by four, which
during the street concert, I fasten on the sides of the
wagon and letter and illustrate during the performance
and through the lecture. There are dozens in the crowd
that stay to watch the work going on that otherwise
would drift from the fold during the drier portion of
the Doctor^s harangue. Last night at Winchester I
made a decided sensation by making a rebus of the well-
known lines from Shakespeare —

"Why let pain your pleasures spoil,
For want of Townsend's Magic Oil?" —

with a life-sized bust of ttie author ; and at another time

WITH THE WIZARD OIL COMPANY 199

a bottle of Townsend's Cholera Balm on legs, and a very
bland smile on its cork, making a ''Can't come if jest-
ure at the skeleton Death, who drops his scythe and
hour glass and turns to flee. Oh! I'm stared at like
the fat woman on the side-show banner. Sunday night
we stayed at Morristown, a little place with two stores
and one church, I shan't include hotel, although the
proprietor of the coop we lodged in insisted on calling
it that. There was nothing left us here but to plunge
into the vortex of dissipation the inhabitants, or na-
tives rather, indulge themselves; and so we went to
church,

''And heard the Parson pray and preach.
And heard his daughter's voice
Singing in the village choir.
For we had no other choice."

We gave them a little music in the morning in our glee
at leaving the town, and far back in the perspective
I caught the flutter of rags on a tow-headed boy.
I breathed a silent prayer for my deliverance. All, my
boy ! the feeling of the breeze on my face.

We shall stay here during the Fair doing street work
at night only in the city. I was here you know some
two or three years since and I expect to find a girl
or two who will still remember me, but it doesn't really
matter whether they do or not, for a smile or two sel-
dom fails to "bring them down'' — especially Fair time.
I have met several of the boys I used to know. I am in
for a good time. You see I have nothing to do but
my boards and I sometimes drift away from the wagon
for hours and "Doxy, white as snow, never kicks."

The law student had now been away from home a
fortnight. He was returning to pleasures of the road.
The relief from the gloomy solitude of the law office —
how could he sufficiently thank Heaven for that. Little
Nell with the dream of fields and woods and riversides
ahead was not more joyous.

"I shall never forget," said Riley, **how ashamed I

200 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

was in Fortville to have a cousin of mine see me beating
the bass drum with that show. But that was the
blur of a moment. It turned out just as I had fore-
seen. The Doctor was a good fellow and he helped me
amazingly. By the time we struck Ohio I was strong
and weU. He had a way of giving a healthy moral twist
to what we were doing. His black chargers were the
apple of his eye. 'Brave horsemanship, my boy/ he
would fondly say as we bowled along, 'gives rise to
sparks of resolution and wakens the mind to noble
action.' *'

Doctor Townsend was a pioneer in his line, ''a gem
in the rough/' his comedians said, ''as loving and kind
in heart as any man living." He traveled in good style.
In addition to his fine horses, his equipment consisted
of a covered wagon with side seats for his company—
and always an ample supply of the "Cure Alls," the
"life savers," such as Magic Oil, Sarsaparilla, Liver
Pills, Cholera Balm, and Cough King. Of musical
instruments there were the bass drum, the bass horn,
banjo, violin, tubia, and B-flat cornet.

The Doctor was a "proficient B-flat," and a good
singer of either bass or soprano. "Riley was a good
singer," said a comedian, "but would not risk his voice
or reputation in the open air." He was content to
teach other members of the company rare old songs
such as "Our Uncle Sam," and at the evening perform-
ance charm his hearers on the violin with such old-
timers as "The Devil's Jig," "Fisher's Hornpipe/' and
"The Arkansas Traveler" on four strings, "with
apologies to Ole Bull."

The company started for the next town in the morn-
ing, arranging to reach it at noon just as the "scholars"
came from school. The toot of a horn woke up the

WITH THE WIZARD OIL COMPANY 201

farm-houses along the road and circulars were scattered
broadcast. At the edge of town the band began to
play and parade the streets. The Doctor gave two
"lectures" a day, one in the afternoon, but the principal
one at night, when they lit the torch lamps and brought
out the decorations. In county-seats, when it was Fair
week, the people came in throngs. When they crowded
the performers, Riley with his blackboards and cartoons
was elevated to a position on the wagon to divide
honors with the Doctor. In Ohio, Riley was introduced
as the "Hoosier Wizard," and the performance he gave
with his voice and brush was remembered when other
features of the show were forgotten. "He was the
center of light," it was said,—

"The weary had life, and the hungry had bliss.
The mourners had cheer, — and lovers a kiss."

Fair week the throng was always interesting. The
weather being warm, the women and girls wore white
dresses, and, said a spectator, "they were ornamented
with the furbelows of fashion." "When the moon rose
to blend her light with the decorations and costumes,"
said Riley, "I was transported to the land of the
Arabian Nights. It was an Aladdin show." Sometimes
he recited "Tradin* Joe," then entitled "Courting on the
Kankakee." Sometimes he appeared in a character
sketch, assuming the role of an old man or a school-
boy. Occasionally, turning up his coat collar and wrap-
ping a red bandana about his neck, he entertained his
hearers from the steps of the wagon, introducing an
original ballad, followed by a comic song. "The bal-
lads," said he, years after, "came from incidents and
experiences on the road. They were written on dull,
hot Sundays in selfish country towns where the church

202 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

bells barked at strangrers while lazy men lolled round in
narrow bits of shade."

At Fort Recovery where the rain drove the come-
dians to a hall above a drug store, the lads and lassies
danced to the music of Riley's violin. At Covington,
where they remained several days, entertainments
were given on the top floor of the new school building.
At another point the Doctor succeeded in renting a
church for his show.

The "Wizards'* were the Troubadours of 1875. Like
their brothers in sunny France, their wits were sharp-
ened, their versatility broadened and their store of
songs and anecdotes replenished by what they saw and
heard. Their merry-making was alluring. "Bright
eyes flashed for them and many times picket gates
swung softly open as they approached."

They reached the Magic Oil laboratory the first week
in October. For the rest of the season Lima was to
be the hub of their travels. Fifty or sixty miles out
touched the rim of the wheel. Again Riley cast a
backward look to Greenfield. The Forty-Niner was a
man in years but in spirit a boy. He was not yet de-
tached from the infiuence of his "salad days," as in-
stanced in extracts from a letter written on his birth-
day at

Lima, Ohio, October 7, 1875.
Dear John : (To J. J. Skinner.)

I shall not enter into any particulars with regard to
the pleasure with which your letter was received — ^let
it suffice you to know that I gorged it "blood raw," I
was so hungry to hear from you. What a gust of news
it contained ; it almost raised my hair — ^two first class
sensations spiced with little breezy notes which I de-
voured with special relish. I thought this place with-
out an equal in regard to its "increase in crime," but

WITH THE WIZARD OIL COMPANY 203

I must knock under for the present for old Greenfield.
A saloon keeper was shot here last week and no particu-
lar stir made about it, nor the man missed. There may
be an ordinance though that all saloon keepers be killed
when found without muzzles. And just here let me
remark that what little prosperity I now enjoy in the
shape of a plug hat is an intimation of my estrange-
ment from the saloon keeper. May God help me on my
good way.

I "stand in'' with the best men of the town and am
rapidly growing in public favor. I'll be out in book
form yet. I wish you were here to room with me at
the nobbiest little boarding house in the world — every-
thing is perfect even to the old lady, the hostess, who
capers under the jocund patronymic of "Aunt Jane."
Speaking of boarding houses, how is the Test House?
I would like to strike old 13 to-night with its enchanted
bed. I need something of that kind now. I think of
you often and of the rare old times we had, and I
still nurse a hope that we may have a grand rehearsal
of them again. Say to Angle that she haunts me; I
saw her in a dream the other night and she had wings
seven feet long and I was just going to ask her to fly
some when the breakfast bell rang and

She vanished as slick

As a slight of hand trick."

As the Wizard Company moved on through western
Ohio, Riley's interest in towns subsided. His want of
curiosity, which distinctly characterized his mature
years, seems to date from this time. When the com-
pany made ado over historical things, he remained pas-
sive. Some said he was in a trance. He was, if by
trance is meant (as he wrote)

"The harvest of a quiet eye
That broods and sleeps upon the heart."

Fort Recovery, a center of maneuvers by "Mad
Anthony Wayne"; Piqua, or Pickaway, the Indian

204 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

village on Mad River, the birthplace of Tecumseh;
Greenville, the site of the Great Indian Treaty where
'"speeches were made by Red Men/' the comedians told
him, ''that would have done honor to the civilized legis-
lative assemblies of the world" ; Sidney, Belief ontaine.
Van Wert, Findlay — all were passed with provoking
indifference. "He was listljess and drowsy/' said his
friends, "as the buzzard that swung around upon the
atmosphere." But when they reached Upper San-
dusky he woke up. "Now," said he, "you have come
to a town with history worth recording." It was hal-
lowed ground. Charles Dickens, on his American tour,
had passed that way by stage from Cincinnati to the
Lakes. Riley wanted to see the old Log Inn where Dick-
ens stayed over night, the "large, low, ghostly room in
which he slept with his dressing-case full of gold,
gleaned from public readings." He wanted to see the
Indians with shaggy ponies that reminded the novelist
of English gipsies — see where the novelist traveled in
the thunder-storm at night — and the illusions in the
black-stump clearings. It was too late to see the cordu-
roy road where "the ponderous carriage fell from log
to log," affording the novelist the sensation he might
have in an omnibus if attempting to go to the top
of a cathedral. It is good description if read with
but half the interest Riley bestowed on it: —

"The stumps of trees," says Dickens, "are a curioua
feature in American travelling. The varying illusions
they represent to the unaccustomed eye as it grows
dark, are quite astonishing in their number and reality.
Now there is a Grecian um erected in the center of a
lonely field ; now there is a woman weeping at a tomb ;
now a very common-place old gentleman in white waist-
coat, with thumb thrust into each armhole of his coat;

WITH THE WIZARD OIL COMPANY 205

now a student poring on a book ; now a crouching ne-
gro ; now a horse, a dog, a cannon, an armed man ; a
hunch-back throwing off his cloak and stepping forth
into the light. They were often entertaining to me/'
so the novelist continues, ''as so many glasses in a
magic lantern, and never took their shapes at my bid-
ding, but seemed to force themselves upon me, whether
I would or no ; and strange to say, I sometimes realized
in them counterparts of figures once familiar to me in
pictures attached to childish books, forgotten long ago.

"It soon became dark, however. The trees were so
close together that their dry branches rattled against
the coach on either side, and obliged us all to keep
our heads within. It lightened, too, for three whole
hours ; each flash being very bright, and blue and long ;
and as the vivid streaks came darting in among the
crowded branches, and the thunder rolled gloomily
above the treetops, one could scarcely help thinking
that there were better neighborhoods at such a time
than the thick woods.

"At length," Dickens concludes, "between ten and
eleven o'clock at night, a few feeble lights appeared
in the distance, and Upper Sandusky, an Indian village,
where we were to stay till morning, lay before us."

Upper Sandusky afforded Riley an opportunity for
the rambles of imagination. Dickens' description of
the thunder-storm he enjoyed thoroughly. He could
match it with a personal experience while traveling
by night through an Indiana forest. The black-stump
clearings with their illusions in the twilight (not the
identical fields, but others like them) were there in the
vicinity of Sandusky, awakening the same sensations
in Riley that pleased the novelist. His heart went back
to his boyhood days and his unshaken faith in fairies.

206 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

''That faith/' said he, when he began to maintain a
fairy interest in his work, "had a great deal to do in
turning my mind to poetry. In my poems I have tried
to get back into the spirit of those dreams. My father
did not have a large library, but a choice one, and
among the books were some that he forbade me to read.
They were books of fairy tales and mythology. Soon
as he was out of sight, however, I was again sporting
with the elves and fairies. It was a wonderful world ;
I was charmed with it because I thought it was real. By
reading the tales I developed my imagination. I saw
fairies and elves everywhere. I mark this as the hap-
piest period of my life, and I wish now that I could
believe in those little sprites, and that the charm had
never been dispelled. Why, I would watch a stump at
a distance for hours, as Dickens did, and imagine I
could see a little boy like myself running about it, and
then he would disappear and I would go and pry around
to find the magic stairway which led down to Pluto's
realm."

While Riley grew less enthusiastic over the towns,
his interest in the Wizard Company did not diminish,
particularly in the proprietor. Each day he and the Doc-
tor grew more companionable. They cracked jokes, it
was said, "with the freedom of the seas." And they
recalled fairy tales — one with a personal application.
The Doctor was the "Puppet Showman," a traveling
theater director, and his comedians the puppets whom
he called before the curtain after the play and hauled
from town to town in his wagon. There was the mys-
tery about the piece of iron that fell through the spiral
and became magnetic (as told in the tale) • "How does
it happen ? Nobody knows. The spirit comes upon the
iron but whence does it come? It is a miracle.

WITH THE WIZARD OIL COMPANY 207

So it is with mankind. People are made to tumble
through the spiral of this world, and the spirit comes
upon them, and there stands a Napoleon or Luther, or
a man of that kind. Men are miracles ; the whole world
is a series of miracles but we in our pride or ignorance
call them every-day matters."

All ignorantly, seeing all as through a glass darkly,
Riley was tumbling through the spiral of events in his
own time as Napoleon and Luther in their time. And
those events (call it miraculous if you like — Riley did),
those events, uncouth, unconventional, rudimental,
magnetized him with the spirit of harmony.

Thus outside the university was he being educated,
not for purposes of the law or statesmanship but for
flights in the realm of song. Faithful to the Muse, he
was obeying impulses received from his favorite
^'Painters and Sculptors." The old books had lost none
of their impelling power. Romney at the same age,
twenty-six, was classed among the illiterate, yet knowl-
edge he certainly had. like him Riley was gifted with
native talents, a keen eye, and a fertile imagination.
The Unseen Powers were keeping him in constant touch
with people and things. In short, they were passing
him through "the spiral of this world." At every
street comer and cross-roads he gleaned something
from somebody. "There are no common men," he re-
plied when blamed for association with common folks.
"I take notice that Jesus sought out the so-called poor
and ignorant. They were just the kind of people He
wanted. They were not poor or ignorant in His sight."
Like his father, Riley liked few things better than a
talk with a blacksmith, carpenter or farmer — a section
boss or a janitor. He found threads of gold in the
riffraff. He never entered a cabin or traveled in a

208 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

farm wagon, never talked with a plowman, or loitered
with a weaver at the loom without learning
something he did not know. Like Robert Burns,
whose genius he rivaled in so many, ways, he "was
sent into the world to see and observe ; he easily com-
pounded with any one who showed him mature nature
in a different light from what he had seen before. The
joy of his heart was to study men, their manners and
their ways, and for this darling object he cheerfully
sacrificed every other consideration."

"Riley is out making a fool of himself somewhere,'*
said a wiseacre back in Greenfield; "it is his one ac-
complishment." But Riley knew what he was about
when he joined himself to the Wizard Oil Company.
Good companion that he was, he took from them and
the people along the way more than he gave. He found
opportunity to give expression to the irrepressible fiow
of joy in his nature. As the days passed, his soul
filled with tender sensations. He was "tremblingly
alive to the beauty of everything^* in nature and human
nature, "with faith in all that was good and enthusiasm
for all that was lovely." Instead of regrets, the Riley
wanderings should occasion rejoicing, for the settled
and reposed man (according to Plato) knocks in vain
at the gate of Poesy.

The author of "The Spirit of Poetry," college gradu-
ate though he was, did not divorce it from the wayward
days of youth. Riley prolonged those days. Wherever
he found hearts filled with good-will, homely humor
and festive enjoyment, there he found poetry. Often-
times it was crude but poetry nevertheless and he was
always happy when he found it in obscure nooks and
crevices. The stately garden, cultivated and enhanced
by the hand of man, was "a thing of beauty" for a

WITH THE WIZARD OIL COMPANY 209

time, but who would strip the earth of its tangled for-
ests and the wild beauty of fields and woodlands? At
a subsequent date in his career, recalling his Ohio days,
Riley sought to give a transcript of those wanderings,
emphasizing in humorous vein, the value of poetry. It
is a prose fragment — a few names with which he dis-
guised the "puppet showmen," — ^the title and a begin-
ning. ''The scene," he said, "was the second floor of a
food joint in Ohio." He entitled the fragment:

A Session of "the singing pilgrims.''
MEMBERS (Mainly present)
T. L. Wilson A. E. Sargeant

P. B. Miller Chas. Marks

Robt. McCrea A. Hilton

D. G. Lewis T. Van Arden

M. W. Smith J. 0. Edgerton

J. W. Foxcroft L. C. Graves

Scene— Back loft— "The Little dordemia" AU-Night
Restaurant.
Time, 10 P. M. — Spread ordered for 2 A. M.

Mr. Lewis: somewhat timidly, rising from the
CHAIR and looking painfully at home in his new posi-
tion as president —

Gentlemen — ^I — er — ^that is : — ^The gift of Song is, as
you are doubtless aware, a divine gift — ^a sacred gift,
I may say; a gift, in fact that in whomsoever's posi-
tion it may rest, I care not, a gift, I say, that should
be regarded by him — or her — as a hallowed trust, at
once elevating and ennobling. We who — are met thus
together are, as I take it, avowedly — of ourselves, at
least — disciples, and practitioners — each in his own
humble degree— of this glorious art. This Glorious Art,
I say, of — of Song! (A mild stimulus of applause).

210 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

Now I am not going to trespass upon time which may
be much better employed in the discussion of your
papers for the evening — (cries of "Go on !'* and "Come
off!" dubiously blended — ^the speaker bowing and con-
tinuing) , but, giving way to your generous encourage-
ment, I do want to dwell — for a brief moment at least—
on Poetry and its true mission — as, I think, we should
most seriously consider it. Now I am, as you know,
unable, in this way, to express myself at all times as
clearly as I would like — ^I can't, as you know, think on
my f eet— •

Mr. Van Arden : / could, if I had them ; and wotdd
"think on" them — ^very seriously. (Laughter.)

Mr. Lewis : Yes. The gentleman might even think
ivith them and find it an improvement upon his brain
process. ( Sensation. )

(This beginning of what the "Hoosier Wizard"
failed to complete provokes a sense of something lost.
One breathes a sigh of regret that it remains unfin-
ished. Humorous literature might have had a prose
sketch equal to his caricature of the educator in "The
Object Lesson.")

The crisp days of November found the Wizard Com-
pany among the upper-tributaries of the Great Miami.
Although the nights were icy and the winds sometimes
raw and vindictive, Riley was inclined to continue the
voyage. He had regained health.

"Still on they went, and as they went,
More rough the billows grew ;
And rose and fell, a greater swell,
And he was swelling, too" —

swelling in size and weight, his heart swelling with
gratitude. When the Company left Greenfield, three

WITH THE WIZARD OIL COMPANY 211

months before, he was called the 'Tiittle Man/* Now
he was not so small. The Doctor considered him a "Big
Man" — ^but the comedians were ignorant of the Doc-
tor's meaning. At Tippecanoe City, Thanksgiving
week, they were overtaken by "Squaw Winter" and
decided to return to Lima.

Although off the road, the days at Lima were not
monotonous. Riley declined to help the Doctor shingle
a house. "YouVe tried to make a great many things
out of me, Doctor," said he, "but you can't make a car-
penter."

"Opposed to manual labor?" asked the Doctor.

"Constitutionally."

"How about painting signs ?"

"Timely suggestion ; I will stain, ingrain, illuminate
or bedizen — paint the town Vermillion if you'll muzzle
the Grand Jury."

The upshot was that Riley, once more in overalls,
was set to work with a bucket of yellow paint in the
laboratory. The signs were fantastic illuminations on
glass, and many set afloat the virtues of Magic Oil in
verse. When fancies were thick-coming he wrote
them in rhyme on the wall. Then he made cartons for
bottles. He started in to help the chemists prepare
remedies for the coming season, but could not mix com-
pounds. As a maker of worm lozenges he was a fail-
ure. He worked when he felt like it. He was humored
to a degree that brought criticism from other work-
men. If the Doctor found Riley sitting by the stove
with his legs crossed and his feet higher than his head,
he credited him on the books with an hour of medita-
tion— and more verses on the wall. "As a comedian he
beats them all," said the Doctor, referring to Riley's
success as an entertainer on the road. His opinion of

212 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

him as an advertiser appears in the following testi-
monial :

C. M. TOWNSEND
Wholesale Dealer

and Proprietor of

TOWNSEND'S MAGIC OIL, WORM. CANDY,
KING OF COUGHS, and HEADACHE PILLS.

No, 171 Market Street
(Lima, Ohio.)

I take great pleasure in saying that James
W. Riley is the most efficient Advertiser I have
ever had in my employ. Throughout an engage-
ment of four months' duration I have found him
ever prompt, industrious and reliable.

C. M. TOWNSEND.

In the laboratory Riley formed an attachment for
James B. Townsend, the Doctor's son, then a student
of law, whom he met in October. It was a friendship
at first sight. As he sat with his new friend by the
kitchen stove, he became interested in Buckle's History
of Civilization, and De Tocqueville's Democracy in
America. Just what relation those mighty tomes have
to ballads and lyrics does not appear, but the Muse was
indulgent. One afternoon while walking and talking
together, the autumn leaves whirling round them, they
looked seriously into their futures. Each was enter-
ing the transitional stage of his life. Each saw
that he was cut out for something better. "The
work they were doing was beneath them. They would
quit sign-painting and working on job wagons, for oc-
cupations more worthy of their talents." They parted
in December, one to become mayor of a city, receiver
for a railroad, and so forth ; the other, by devious paths,
to rise to eminence in literature.

^-^^:^:^-;^^z..,.

lWITH the wizard oil company 213

James Townsend was reared in a model American
home. While in Lima, Riley was an inmate of that
home. Thus he and the family were afforded the mem-
ory of a rare and genial companionship. Happily the
reader has left to him a picture of those days. "Riley
was a gentleman/' said Mr. Townsend, "a little odd
but never meaning any harm. He kept himself scrupu-^
lously clean. He had sandy-colored hair. His mus-
tache of the same hue was long and heavy and when he
played the violin it spread out and mingled with the
strings. His music awakened deep feelings. What he
did with his hands was done with ease and grace. He
handled his feet and legs more awkwardly. I recall
the peculiar *Abe Lincoln' twist he gave his feet when
he sat down and crossed them over the back of a
chair. He was natural and sun-shiny, then at intervals
a little sombre and sad, a perfect manifestation of
nature, weaving into each day natural and simple
pleasures, his face wreathed in smiles and breaking out
into the most intoxicating laughter. Then again he
would have long spells of silence. His gifts were mar-
velous— all were there, not yet wide awake. Some-
times he would read verses to my sister and laugh and
blush as he confessed to their authorship. When we
read books together, he would amplify and illuminate
the author's meaning in a most exceptional manner.
To conclude — ^he was a sensitive plant, wholly uncon-
ventional. He dared not give too much thought and
study to the writings of others for fear that his own
utterances would take on their peculiar hue. He was
strictly individual. He thought best when left alone,
untrammelled by the world, or others. My lament is
that, owing to his timidity and modesty, his fellowmen

214 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

have not been permitted to look into the great world of
prose and philosophy concealed in his heart."

When they were talking on weighty subjects in the
woods, Mr, Townsend remembered that Riley stood
with uncovered head, and in an eager, listening atti-
tude. He had large, lustrous eyes — ^the eyes of "The
Remarkable Man" — ^that had that dreamy far-off look,
seeing what is described, though it is buried under
the pyramids of Egypt.

"It is not doubted that men have a home in that place
where each one has established his heart and the sum
of his possessions ; whence he will not depart if nothing
calls him away; whence if he has departed he seems
to be a wanderer, and if he returns he ceases to wan-
der." Thus Riley had repeated the words while spin-
ning along the highway with the Doctor, priding him-
self on the one thing in "Conditions from Civil Law,"
he could remember. He had smiled over "the sum of
his possessions," and the comedians had heartily en-
joyed the joke. After working a month in the labora-
tory he began to think seriously of home. "Greenfield,"
he said, "had been but a speck on the map of Retrospect
tion — so novel had been my experience on the road. I
had not made haste to return. Like a checker player,
I had one fixed purpose in mind and that was to take
plenty of time." But with the coming of winter days
and calls from home, came also the desire to cease wan-
dering. One of the calls was from the Sunday-school.
The similarity in the illustrations of the golden text
was growing monotonous. "Our blackboard," wrote a
friend, "does not possess the beauty it did when it re-
ceived the magic touch of your artistic fingers." The
children were sighing for the illustrated "Whisper
Songs" and "Lessons for Little People." In the spring

WITH THE WIZARD OIL COMPANY 215

before leaving Greenfield, he had been a wizard at the
blackboard. ''What he did with a piece of yellow chalk
and the unicorn/' said a Sunday-school goer, ''was to
say the least unorthodox. Such flying colors ! He made
the blackboard look like a millinery establishment. To
the children it was as good as a magic-lantern show."
An added reason for his leaving was that
he had become too conspicuous in Lima for per-
sonal comfort. Of late the "Hoosier," to use his own
words, "had been scrutinized by strangers as critically
as a splinter in the thumb of a near-sighted man.'' At
Lima Riley had his "seedy overcoat" improved
by lining it with astrakhan. That coat, it was
said, "made the farmers green with envy; it set
the style for fur-lined overcoats in Allen County."
The public eye becoming a little too obtrusive,
Riley resolved to cross over into "the selvedge of
his native state," Kft his voice and hat, and shout de-
liverance from "the land of perpetual strangers." In
the early dusk of a December evening, he stepped from
the train at Union City, and after a few days with "a
remarkable man" boarded the "Bob Tail Acconmioda-
tion" for Hancock County.

The Greenfield Democrat, which had already begun
what proved to be a half-century record of the poet's
goings and comings, was awake as usual. For five
years it had struck off Riley locals with the fidelity of
a clock. December 23, 1875, it struck again: "James
W. Riley arrived in the city on Friday last. He is look-
ing fine and enjoying excellent health."

CHAPTER X

SCRIBBUNG IN GRUB STREET

A POLITE city, according to Dean Swift, should
have its Grub Street, a blind alley fitted up at
the public expense as an apartment for the
Muses. A private street, as Doctor Johnson put it,
for writers of small histories, temporary poems,
and inferior literary productions. Greenfield had
such an alley in the seventies of the last century. Ac-
cording to Riley, its assets were a garret, a paintshop,
two or three gloomy hotel rooms, a lead pencil and the
"Respectfully Declined" papers of the D4but Club. Lia^
bilities unknown — not obtainable. He recalled that the
alley was a refuge for a writer pursued by the town
marshal for debt. "Often," said he, gleefully exag-
gerating, "I ran down an alley with an officer behind
me. Beware of debt," he moaned, mimicking Horace
Greeley ; "he is a rich man who owes nothing and has
a chance to earn his daily bread." Those insolvent days
throw light on a bill bearing the date of October,
1891, from the proprietor of a hotel in Kentucky,
who once was the landlord of the old Dunbar House.
"Do you remember," wrote the proprietor, "the fellow
who had the old Greenfield Hotel and that you dropped
in sometimes to see him away back in the Hayes cam-
paign? I find on my books a charge of $3.40."

In 1876 the poet unable to pay for a week's lodging ;
in 1891, his books and his royalties running into the
thousands — ^the author eager to pay all bills, large or

216

SCRIBBLING IN GRUB STREET 217

small, old or new, visible or obscure. Here is the con-
trast of fifteen years. Truly a typical instance of
hardships .in the literary field, another lesson in small
beginnings.

His Grub Street effusions include embryonic things
from all quarters of the sky, a "mass of metrical
baubles'' that were too frail and futile to last. Within
a few years, like dry forest leaves, they went "flying
and scurrying God knows where." Among the first
was "The Poet's Realm," to which Riley subscribed
himself "Edym," his first ruym de plume — ten eight-
line stanzas, describing a dreamland somewhere in
space where the soul drifts away on the breeze like a
fairy wisp of thistledown leaving the heart an empty
husk "on the coast of Care and Pain." Sunbeams
glanced on the walls of a palace in a garden of vines and
flowers and fountains. There was the ebb and flow
of music, fair ladies and lords and the rustle of scarfs
and plumiBs, a courtly company and melody going mad
at a banquet:

"Clang the harp in its wildest key.
And shatter the bugle's throat ;
Fling the flags from the balcony
And the bridge across the moat :
In his goodly realm so broad and wide.
The Poet hath no fear —
Bagged, haggard and hungry-eyed
He is lord and master here."

When Riley wrote these lines he was purblind, as he
himself admits in a subsequent chapter. "Not there,
not there, my child," repeated the Muse; "not in
distant space or in foreign lands. It has been done
that way before. Your realm is here at home, right
under your feet. You 'are to live on the coast of Care

218 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

and Pain but your heart is not to be an empty husk.
You are not to singr of palaces and lords and ladies. You
are to sing of log cabins, of children, of common folk in
the kitchen, in the shop and at the plow."

Riley soon tired of "Edym" and within a year sub-
scribed himself "Jay Whit." Some ten years elapsed
before that April day in 1881, when, after writing
"The Ripest Peach is Highest on the Tree," he pulled
the joints out of his name, and first signed himself
James Whitcomb Riley.

After "The Poet's Realm," Riley wrote "A Retro-
spect," in several stanzas of which he wanders back to
the scenes of boyhood, back to the house where he was
bom, back to the swing under the locust tree, back to
the schoolroom,

"And down through the woods to the swimming hole,
Where the big, white, hollow old sycamore grows."

After "A Retrospect" came "Philiper Flash," ten ten-
lin6 stanzas, which Mrs. Rhoda Millikan, who of all the
Greenfield mothers had a right to know, said half was
his personal experience. Riley said a third, which
makes it certain that a fraction at least was biograph-
ical.

"Young Philiper Flash was a promising lad,
His intentions were good — ^but oh, how sad.

For a person to think

How the veriest pink
And bloom of perfection may turn out bad."

Young Flash was the son of a moral father who
"shaved notes in a harheroua way," and vauntingly
prided himself on making the boy do what he was told ;
the pet of an excellent mother "with a martyr look,"

SCRIBBLING IN GRUB STREET 219

who loved him so tenderly she could cry when he
stumped his toe.

"She stroked his hair
With such mother care
When the dear little angel learned to swear."

The way the fast young man jingled the dollars and
dimes and strewed his wealth was the talk of the land.
Things went from bad to worse.

"Young Philiper Plash, on a winterish day,
Was published a bankrupt, so they say ;
And as far as I know
I suppose it was so,
For matters went on in a singular wajr^-n

in short, went to smash, and young Philiper Flash had
to begin life over again.

Fortunate, indeed, said Higginson, that poets unin-
tentionally preserve for us samples of their early crude-
ness, — and unfortunate indeed, added his friend, that
they intentionally preserve samples of their late crude-
ness and offer it to the public as poetry. That we have
samples of Riley's authorship, early or late, is not
directly due to any sense of value he put on them but to
a clear, well-defined superstition that he must not de-
stroy anything he wrote. He was the instrument of the
Muses but it was not his function to determine values.
To make a book was an affliction. He never could de-
cide happily or conclusively what to include and what
to reject. To him his poems were ventures on an uncer-
tain sea. "How," he once remarked, "were the sons of
poverty and rhyme ever to know what to offer? The
wren feeds on what the eagle overlooks." Making a
poem, he would say with Bums, was like begetting a
son ; you can not Imow whether you have a wise man

220 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

or a fool until you have given him to the world to try
him.

The exception to the foregoing is the emphatic dis-
count he put on most of his Grub Street productions
covering tiie first five years of the seventies. That they
were crude went without saying, and in the front row
of these he included that ''perfect wrangle of bad gram-
mar/' his first poem to find its way into print, which
appeared in the Poet's Column of the Greenfield Com-
mercioL "Metrical bauble" though it was, on the day
of its publication he read it over and over again till
the lines actually sounded musical to him. 'That con-
tribution," said he, "looked larger to me than the big-
gest sign I ever painted. Why, I was sure— sure, mind
you — ^that it could be seen across the waters." Since
he, in amateurish glee, read it with such fervor, per-
haps the reader would like to see it : —

POET'S COLUMN

For the Commercial

THE SAME OLD STORY TOLD AGAIN

The same old story told again —

The maiden droops her head.

The rip'ning glow of her crimson cheek

Is answering in her stead.

The pleading tone of a trembling voice

Is telling her the way

He loved her when his heart was young

In Youth's sunshiny day.

The trembling tongue, the longing tone,

Imploringly asking why

They cannot be as happy now

As in the days gone by?

And two fond hearts, tumultuous

With overflowing joy.

Are dancing to the music

Which that dear, provoking boy

SCRIBBLING IN GRUB STREET 221

Is twanging on his bowstring,
As, fluttering his wings.
He sends his loved-charged arrows
While merrily he sings :
"Ho ! ho ! my dainty maiden.
It surely cannot be
You are thinking you are mistress
Of your heart when it is me."
And another gleaming arrow.
Does the little god's behest
And the dainty little maiden
Falls upon her lover's breast.
The same old story told again,
And listened o'er and o'er,
Will still be new, and pleasing, too.
Till time shall be no more.

Edybn.
Sept 7, 1870.

Longfellow, shuddering before the windows of the
PosUGdzette building while its walls rumbled with the
jar of ink-balls and presses, waiting for his "Battle of
Lovell's Pond," was not a whit more agitated than was
Riley before the door of the Commercial office. Al-
though the latter had seen twenty-one summers, he was
as young at heart as the boy of thirteen in Portland.
The desire to write the lines had been stealing over his
youthful innocence for some time. After they were
written came the mental strain. **The first day," said
a Grub Street chum, *Tie was absent from dinner ; the
second, when nobody was looking he took the lines to
the editor." The state of Riley's mind as he stood by
the Commercial office door with the manuscript, is best
related in his own words : — j

"A weird atmosphere hung over the office. Strange
footsteps through the hall and sounds of muffied voices
fell on my half -conscious hearing. No weighty prob-

222 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

lems of finance rolled heavily along the empty corri-
dors of thought. Down the vista of my dream the
Democratic platform vanished like a ghost at daybreak.
Something vague, shadowy and indefinable seemed to
hang over me. As I tip-toed to the door and listened,
I heard distinctly the words, *The Editor.' What could
they mean?

" 'Walk in and tackle him,' whispered an invisible
monitor. I slowly turned the knob. 'Listen/ said I,
'did you not hear something shriek?'

" 'Suppose you did/ returned my monitor. — -'Why do
you tremble?'

" 'Perhaps he's coming out.'

*' 'Let him come ; you can give it to him here/

"A chill rippled over me ; I could give it to him any-
where, I thought, but he was liable to frown and kick.
I was at the point, absent-mindedly, of knocking at the
door when my monitor said, 'Go in without knocking ;
he's not coming out : go right in ; beard the lion in his
den' — ^and I went in, told the editor how I had hesi-
tated and then sank to the floor. Five minutes later
I recovered and on leaving the ofiice, cast one look back-
ward. He was punching and crumpling my manuscript
with a blue pencil as if it were a lizard or a spider."

Just how much of the foregoing is the play of Riley's
fancy the reader may determine. Learning his "poem"
was to be printed, he got a proof as soon as it was set up
but kept all a secret till the day of the paper's issue.
The work of his pen in type for the first time— earth
had no joy like that — ^never had had anything like it!
Who "Edym" was, was not known for several dajrs.
When the secret leaked out, "his friends," said one of
them, "rallied round him and filled his head with the
usual supply of flattery and nonsense. His father's

SCRIBBLING IN GRUB STREET 223

comment was not encouraging. *Edym' did not borrow
a dollar, buy extra copies and mail to distant friends.
Borrowing was not his forte in those days."

Riley's first experience with '^poetry" antedated his
"first poem in print" fifteen years. "It was while I was
a small boy/' said he, "that I wrote my first rhymes.
They were the outcome of what seemed dire necessity
to my childish mind. The children in Greenfield were
in the habit of sending valentines back and forth. They
were of the old-fashioned sort ; the pictures were cari-
catures, the verses doggerel. They cost but a cent
a piece but I was so small that pennies were not given
me for valentines. I wanted to send them, all the same ;
so with some cheap crayon I sketched pictures on scrap
paper as nearly like the boughten pictures as I could,
only I tried to make the faces look like those I meant to
send them to. After I had colored my crude figures I
remembered that my valentines had no mottoes. So I
made up rhjones as I went along. It was childish stuff,
but it met the approval of my mother from whom I
inherited my inclination for drawing. She was so
pleased she let me have my own way for a week."
. Above his second pen name, "Jay Whit," such "drib-
blings" as "Mockery," "Flames and Ashes," "A Bal-
lad," and "Johnny," appeared in the Indianapolis
Mirror in 1872. "The Poet's Wooing," and "Man's De-
votion," (the former was rejected) were illustrated by
himself, thus again exercising the gift inherited from
his mother. Writing of the latter two in February to
his brother John who was then living in Indianapolis
he said:

"Of late I am startlingly prolific in composing. I
could dispose of my productions like brick — so much
per thousand.

224 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

And say, Dear brother, you will sign 'Jay Whit/
Providing the paper will publish it.

And if they should refuse, let me down gently. I have
written with a pencil to make it as plain as possible to
you — don't let them see my manuscript — ^unless you
should endeavor to publish it in an illustrated paper— r
you may then submit my illustration to them. Yours
obscurely."

Of "A Ballad/' a sea story, he wrote his brother in
May as follows :

"If you can't get this on the front page, don't put
it in, for I consider it the best thing I have ever writ-
ten and I want to see it occupy a front seat — or we'll
let it stand till one can be procured.

"Try it for this week — And feel them a little on a
prose sketch — ^for instance (do it this way) : 'He has
written some sketches that I consider good — not tire-
some and so forth — ^but racy — original — ^with now and
then a little spice of poetry — humor — ^wit — and quite
pathetic occasionally — and so forth' — ^understand ? Try
it and send me the result.

"Use your best endeavors to send it to the editor this
week. If published, I expect there will be some one
from Greenfield (referring to his brother) who would
like to hand his name down to posterity by having it
said that he once brought me from the renovator's, a
second-hand coat — ^when I was too poor to even thank
him for his trouble. (Exit laughing.) "

"Johnny," a story of three thousand words, was
the first sketch to appear in print. The plot is so
simple a child could remember it. The scene
is a country town with its surplus of village
gossip, barking dogs, and dinner bells. There
is the meeting of a bachelor and a widow in

SCRIBBLING IN GRUB STREET 225

her mourning weeds on an April evening, a fire at
midnight and the rescue of the widow's boy from a
burning roof by the bachelor — and then in swift suc-
cession the courtship and the marriage. The story was
"racy and original" as its author wrote when seeking to
have it printed in the county paper, but "dull and tire-
some'' when he grew older and consigned it to the
waste basket.

In 1873, as we have seen, the Argonaut was away
from Greenfield with the "Graphics." In the spring
and summer of 1874, he sent "Private Theatricals," "At
Last," "The Poet's Wooing," "My Jolly Friend's Se-
cret," "Plain Sermons," "A Summer's Afternoon," and
"That Little Dorg" to the Danbury News. All were
accepted as the effusions of a "rising litterateur." They
lacked the spontaneous felicity of after years but were
evidence of merit nevertheless. News of their ac-
ceptance came to him "like a shower to a fainting
strawberry." Montgomery Bailey and his "Danbury
News Man" were popular in Greenfield as elsewhere.
The incessant fiow of humor from his pen had quick-
ened Riley's sense of drollery for some time, and the
editor in turn caught gleams of funny things in "Jay
Whit." Of course the contributions were free. It was
honor enough to have them accepted. Here was some-
thing new. Riley had crossed the Hudson. He had
penetrated the Icy East :

"What were his feelings as grave and alone.
He sat in the silence, glaring in the grate
That stewed and sighed on in an undertone
As subtle — ^immovable as fate?"

What were his feelings? Too numerous and unknow-
able for consideration here. But one thing was settled
— settled at that very early date. Hungry as he was

226 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

for eastern recognition, he would not be absorbed by it.
"Whenever a writer west of the Alleghany Mountains/'
fiaid he, "has risen to eminence, the East has absorbed
him with greedy haste. By this process his genius
loses the tang of its native region, the flavor of the soil
from which he sprung, and the soil loses the talent it
nurtured and on which it had a claim/'

In February, 1874, "Farmer Whipple — ^Bachelor''
was printed in the Greenfield News, and in December,
"Tradin' Joe" appeared. Both poems were written
without thought of publication. Their author tucked
them away in his "reticule" for recitation in school-
houses and on his country excursions. "Farmer Whip-
ple" was one of the popular numbers recited from the
steps of the Wizard Oil wagon.

"In those days," said Riley, "I had a 'dramatic'
friend who was on the rocks as often as I was. When I
was begging for bread the idea invariably struck him
that I could in some way, unknown to fortune, make
ends meet, and promote his schemes however gigantic
or unattainable they were." A letter from the friend
came from Pendleton in February, 1874. "I have a
desire," he wrote, "to go into partnership with you.
An idea has just struck me. Perhaps we could buy out
the editor who publishes the paper here. I think we
could make money out of it. You are a good writer,
and would then have something to do. We could save
our money and then go into a dramatic company to-
gether. I mean engage one of our own. If you are
willing to be steady and work and save and try, come
over and see me and find out if the editor will sell and
at what price. The reason I write the above is that I
learn that you now have nothing to do" (and so forth).
The letter set "Jay Whit" considering seriously the

SCRIBBLING IN GRUB STREET 227

newspaper field, as did also a postal card from his
Graphic Chum referring to a prospect of emplojrment
on the Kokomo Republican^ which (in the chum's
opinion) the Hoosier Humorist could make a better
paper than the Danbury News. Late in the year he
applied for work at the office of the Greenfield News.
The editor was not able to pay for work. "Sorely as I
need it," said the applicant, "it is not money I want but
experience." Next week the News appeared with :

W. T. Walker, Editor

J. W. Riley, Associate Editor.

"We now have in our office," (so wrote the Associate
Editor, though the News' readers imputed the pleas-
antry to the Editor) — "a red-headed devil who loses his
hair occasionally by spontaneous combustion. He
wears a tiny hat and never considers himself in full
dress without a Babcock fire extinguisher on his back.
In times past he has contributed to the News under
the nom de plume of 'Jay Whit.' Now as local editor
he will doubtless infuse into its columns the spell of his
sobriquet without the h. To say that this new member
of our staff will make the local columns hum would be
placing it mild. Many of his friends think he has
struck his proper gait and will develop into a great
editor."

It was the Associate Editor's province to collect
items from townspeople and countrymen and "em-
bellish them for publication." Then it was that the
"apprentice-poet of the town, rising to impassioned
heights" began

"To lighten all the empty, aching miles
Around with brighter fancies, hopes and smiles.''

228 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

He threw in with the Hominy Ridge items local adver-
tising rhymes such as :

"Carpets coarse and carpets fine,
Rich in color and design,
Sold at bargains half divine" —
(with name of business firm attached.)

"Has anybody heard of a cure for window panes ?" he
asked. An old lady sent full instructions for a liver
pad. He did not know about that, '1>ut a half section
of number one strawberry shortcake makes a stomach
pad that has few equals and no superior/'

To his little comrade in the street : "Now the small
boy busies himself collecting pennies for the circus,"
ran a local, "but he will probably crawl under the can-
vas as heretofore. May he have his usual good luck."

Nor did the local editor neglect his rural neighbors :

"The farmer works his hired hand
From four o'clock in the morning light
Till eight or nine o'clock at night,
And then finds fault with his appetite."

After this he would go after them for delinquent sub-
scriptions : "The last twenty-five sticks of an editor's
woodpile vanish before his eyes like the morning dew."
When items were scarce, in corn-planting time, for in-
stance, he "would go out and look over the Poor Farm
and come back with a basketful of abuse, neglect and
so on."

It goes without sasring that the Associate Editor sup-
plied the News liberally with effusions of a literary
character. There Were such fledglings in verse as
"Leloine" (a faint imitation of Poe), "An Autumn
Leaf," and "The Ancient Printerman." The paper

SCRIBBLING IN GRUB STREET 229

almost staggered under the weight of ''Babe Mc-
Dowell/' the story of a college student falling in love
with a beautiful girl who was training for the stage.
"My first story to require serial publication," remarked
Riley. "Length was its sole merit.*'

In the spring of 1875 he made another bid for east-
em recognition. Purchasing a sample copy of Hearth
and Home at a news-stand, he concluded to try his luck
with the doughty "Ik Marvel," who had charmed him
with Reveries of a Bachelor. He sent him "A
Destiny/' which twenty years later was given the title
"The Dreamer" in A ChUdrWorld — ^"the poem about a
long-haired young man/' as Riley expressed it, "who
associated much with himself, took to solitude, and
walked alone in the woods/' It was published April
tenth with three quaint illustrations; the first, the
strange young man without companions, his hat and
book on the ground in the shade of a majestic tree,
the dreamer

"Lsring limp, with upturned gaze.
Idly dreaming away his days" :

the second and third, the farmer at the pasture bars,
who saw the fragment of legal cap paper with the sum-
mer rhyme thereon, which he chased to the thicket of
trees, and there discovered that its author was not a
poet but the inventor of a chum.

When Riley received the issue of Hearth and Home
containing his poem and a letter commending his verse,
together with a draft for eight dollars, he "proceeded"
(to quote his own words) "to build a full-sized air cas-
tle. At last he had struck the trail to fortune. He walked
in the clouds" — ^and likewise walked down to the Green-

230 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

field Banking Company to cash the draft — ^the first he
had ever received for a poem. He was rich — ^rich as
the parson with forty pounds a year. Louisa May Al-
cott did not have fairer visions of fortune when she sold
her first story to the newspaper for five dollars. Sev-
eral days it was humorously whispered round town that
"Jay Whit," after waiting* so long and so patiently,
would now be able "to liquidate his debts/' Alas, for
the wide gulf between them and the size of the draft.
"He paid no debts,*' said a Greenfield chum ; "it was a
red letter day ; we stood on our heads for joy and lived
like nabobs while the money lasted." But the game was
yet by no means in his own hands. Just when the Asso-
ciate Editor was making a name for himself and colors
were flying, the News was sold, its name changed to
Republican and his dreams shattered. The paper went
from bad to worse and soon joined the great majority.
"I strangled the little thing," said Riley. "Then
I continued to grind out poetry for ^literary depart-
ments/ I more than supplied the foreign demand
with plenty left over for home use. When I sent an
editor a prose sketch he advised me to try poetry. I
did so and scribbled away at the rate of 2 :40 a ream.
Then he advised me to try prose again. This was too
much. Pursuing the tenor of my own way, I had my
hair cut, painted a sign or two and played the guitar."
Throughout his Grub Street experience he had always
a meager income from his trade. When other ventures
failed he could paint a sign. To this end he vibrated
between Greenfield and Anderson.

While he was thus lingering along in doubt, he was
handed the following circular from the Western Union
Telegraph Company, then located in the old Blackford
Block, corner Washington and Meridian, Indianapolis :

SCRIBBLING IN GRUB STREET 231

Dear Siri

Will you please keep me advised promptly by
telegraph, of all important news transpiring in your
vicinity, such as homicides, suicides, accidents, and
matters of moment that may be exciting the public
attention. I will pay at the rate of fifty cents a special,
settlement to be made at the end of each month. Make
the special short as possible. By doing this you will
greatly oblige

Yours truly,

R. T. HOWABD,

Manager of Specials.

*'I proceeded," said Riley, "to build another air castle.
I recalled a valuable list of fires, suicides and accidents
in the past. Remittance for press telegrams would buy
shoes and bread. But, strange to relate, not a lax,
shabby, villainous thing happened the whole summer.
Monotony was a drug on the market. They had lynched
the negro the week before the circular came. There
were weeks of waiting. I grew ill. The while I tried
to study law — and if wading through that deplorable
stuff (he was quoting from Bleak HoTise), if charging
down the middle and up again, if going through that
country dance of costs and fees and corruption will not
make a man sick, nothing else will. The humdrum
days continuing, I proceeded to make a little excite-
ment of my own. A traveling showman passing by,
I climbed on the wagon and shed the town."

Returning from that "rather lengthy sojourn in
the Buckeye State" (with the Wizard Oil Company),
he immediately ascended the stairs to the old room in
the Dunbar House, which not only sheltered the Grub
Street tenant, but had the honor of being the first
"literary den" in the town. Up there in room 13 (his
superstition about the number was not yet a trouble-

232 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

some factor) , up there he spun political jingles for the
Hayes and Wheeler campaigrn ; up there he had written
"The Dreamer/' and one cold January night while his
room-mate sighed over the waste of coal oil he rose
from his bed and saved some fragments which he tied
together the next day for "My Fiddle/' Up there he
was wont to "switch the bow and lean back and laugh
and wink at every rainy day" ; up there

"They tell me, when he used to plink
And plonk and plunk and play.
His music seemed to have the kink
Of driving cares away/'

While occupying "old 13" he sent a "bulky envelope/'
a second sample of his "fancy work/' to Hearth and
Home. The venture was disastrous^ "By the time
my effusions reached them/' said Riley, "the hand of
Fate had closed the institution like a telescope." The
verse came back but the sting was taken away some-
what by the letter from Donald G. Mitchell:

THE GRAPHIC COMPANY

The Daily Graphic Hearth and Home

$12 Per Year $2.50 Per Year

New York, February 18, 1876.
Mr. J. W. Riley,
Dear Sir:

The sudden decision of the Graphic Managers to
discontinue the publication of Hearth and Home forth-
with, compels tiie return of the accompanying very
graceful poem, which I should otherwise publish with
pleasure.

Trusting that you may not be discouraged from
further exercise of your literary talent through a
more fortunate medium, I remain.

Yours respectfully,

the Ex Editor of "H. & H/'

SCRIBBLING IN GRUB STREET 233

The "very graceful poem" was **A Country Path-
way/' which he had written on the banks of lick
Creek in Madison County, where he was visiting
friends for a week at an old-fashioned homestead.
One day, after whiling a few hours with wheat
thrashers three miles from the homestead, he returned
across the fields. At one point he followed a path
overhung with willow boughs. 'It was a dar-
ling pathway," he said, recalling the afternoon
walk; "I yearned for something to dispel the mist
from my future. What would I not give to know
that my path of life would lead on through scenes
of enchantments and up to the door of a smiling
world as my country pathway led me through the
valley, and across the orchard to the door of smil-
ing friends."

To the "disastrous venture" in Hearth a/nd Home,
lovers of Riley verse are largely indebted for "The
Shower." There was in connection therewith a
touch of rustic beauty and purity in a "British Book"
which ha recalled with lively pleasure. "A rainbow
in the sky, the glittering of the rain upon the leaves ;
the dripping poultry under the hedge; the reflection
of the cattle on the road, and the girl with her gown
over her shoulders," — sl picture which placed James
Burnet in the first rank as a pastoral painter; and it
is equally true that "The Shower" and after it "The
Sudden Shower" placed Riley in the front rank of
lyric poets.

On receiving the Hearth and Home letter, Riley
was more interested in "Ik Marvel" than ever. One
day he ran across "A Picture of Rain." "Will any-
one," asked Mitchell, "give us on canvas, a good,
rattling, saucy shower? There is room in it for a

234 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

rare handling of the brush : — the vague, indistinguish-
able line of the hills, — ^the gray lines, slanted by
the wind and trending eagerly downward, — ^the swift
petulant dash into the little pools, making fairy bub-
bles that break as soon as they form, — ^the land smok-
ing with excess of moisture, — and the pelted leaves
all wincing and shining and adrip/'

"Why don't you try it?" asked his Graphic Chum.

"You might as well ask the clouds to rain," an-
swered Riley. However the query did set hini think-
ing and in due time

"The cloud above put on its blackest frown.
And then, as with a vengeful cry of pain.
The lightning snatched it, ripped and flung it down
In ravelled shreds of rain:

"While he, transfigured by some wondrous art,
Bowed with the thirsty lilies to the sod,
His empty soul brimmed over, and his heart
Drenched with the love of God."

CHAPTER XI

THE STRANGE YOUNG MAN!

DO YOU know Whitcomb Rileyr
"Whit Riley? — oh, yes, I know him and his
folks well. People round these parts don't
think much of him. He is sort o' flighty and no good."
Such was the answer a newspaper corresi>ondent re-
ceived from an old lady, a resident of Greenfield, who
like some of her neighbors had less faith in Riley's
future than those who looked on from a distance. She
had seen many human riddles in the Carolinas where
she once lived, but none, she was quite certain, so mys-
terious as "that young Riley," none who played at cross
purposes so abstrusely. "Just when he seems to be
getting a start at sign-painting or the law," said
another neighbor, "he flies the track and over the hills
he goes." While collecting items for the Greenfield
News, he would be unaccountably seized with a desire
to write verse, and so he would hie away "to Fortville
or down to Fountaintown, where," he said, "I
rented a dingy upstairs room for ten cents a week,
and locked the door." Thus he avoided the look of idle
curiosity that often confronted him around the Green-
field post-office. Too often for his comfort "the won-
dering eyes of the curious rabble" were fastened on
box 15, his letter box, with its pamphlets, papers, and
magazines, and the numerous letters with mysterious
postmarks, ever crowding into it. To old-timers his
withdrawal from society was past comprehension.

235

236 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

Usually, they observed, folks were happy when they
were the center of attraction. Not so with Riley.
During those intervals of absence from home (to
borrow the "corduroy" lines) :

"He lingered and delayed.
And kept his friends away ;
Shut himself within his room and stayed
A-writing there from day to day ;
He kept a-getting stranger still,
And thinner all the time,
You know, as any fellow will,
On nothing else but rhyme/*

'And when after a two weeks' vigil he returned,"
said one of his comrades, 'Oie was still the pale, sad-
eyed subject of bewilderment, the problem Fate alone
could decipher. He had dreams that he himself but
half understood and of course none of his friends
understood." He was the man he describes in "Fame,"
who drew

"A gloom about him like a cloak.
And wandered aimlessly. The few
Who spoke of him at all, but spoke
Disparagingly of a mind
The Fates had faultily designed :
Too indolent for modem times —
Too fanciful and full of whims —
For, talking to himself in rhymes,
And scrawling never-heard-of hymns,
The idle life to which he clung
Was worthless as the songs he sung!"

The "strange young man" was not always melan-
choly. There were days, sometimes weeks, when he
was a perfect battery of merriment. He was a droll,
ridiculous genius, the gifted, good-for-nothing Bob

ORDERS OF SERVICE

» • ^

No. 359

His Holy Temple.

P PP

The Lord is in His holy temple,Let all the earth keep 8ileDoe,keep sileoce before Him. A-

'a'WJ

ft ^4! II HI [»

jziz

PTt

AU repeat: ( With bowed heads and elottd eyes. )

''Let the words of my mouth, and the med-
itation of my heart, be acceptable in Thy
aight, 0 Lord, my strength and my Redeemer.

Silent Prayer.

All repeat: ( With botced heads and elossd eyes.)

The Lord's Prayer.

Onr Father, which art in Heaven, hallowed
be Thy name. Thy kingdom come: Thy will
be done in earth as it is in Heaven.

Give OS this day oar daily bread: and for-
give as our debts, as we forgive oar debtors.

And lead as not into temptation, bat de-
liver as from evil: for Thine is the kingdom,
and the power, and the glory, forever. Amen.

Leader — I was glad when they said unto
me. Let as go into the house of the Lord.

Response — Pray for the peace of Jeru-
salem ; they shall prosper that love Thee.

L.— Peace be within Thy walls, and pros-
perity within Thy palaces.

R. — Serve the Lord with gladness and
come before His presence with singing.

L.— Enter into His gates with thanks-
giving and into His courts with praise.

All sing:

0 Worship the Kin$.

(See Music No. 242.)

kJi ^—^ . ', l" I

1. 0 wor-ship the King. A - mkr.

1 0 worship the King all-glorious above,
And gratefully sing His wonderful love;
Our Shield and Defender, the Ancient of

Days,
Pavilioned in splendor, and girded with

praise. Amen.

All repeat:

The Apostles' Greed.

I believe in God the Father Ahnighty,
Maker of Heaven and earth;

And in Jesus Christ His only Son our
Lord; who was conceived l^ the Holy
Ghost; bom of the Virgin Mary; suffered
under Pontius Pilate; was crucified, dead,
and buried; the third day He rose again
from the dead; ^e ascended into Heaven;
and sitteth on the right hand of God the
Father Almighty; from thence He shall
come to judge the quick and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Ghost; the holy
Catholic Church; the Communion of Saints;
the Forgiveness of sins; the Resurrection of
the body; and the Life everlasting. Amen.

All sing:

Gloria Patri.

{See Musio No. 808.)

■H-

Glo-ry be to the Fa-ther.

¥■

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son,
and to the Holy Ghost; As it was in the
beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world
without end, Amen, Amen.

No. 360.

Gloria Patri, No. 1.

No. 361.

Gloria Patri, No. 2.

— ifeUzJ Ui Ui \^ i Ij tJ Is ill

TT-

W£

Gkvy be CO tkt Fftther, and to tke 8od, ud

At it wM ta tke iMfboiBf , ie now, end er • er ebeO be, world

to the Ho • l|jr Ghort;
mL A

d er • er ebeO be, world w^- out «id. A • b«.

ir r it it iF X IF F L' ill

No. 362. All People that on Earth do Dwell.

PSAla lOO.

'iJIJjijIJalili ' li'l' '''III ' Nl

1. AD peo • pie thet on euth do dmll, Shif Co the L<vd with cbe«4al Toiee;HiB nrve with iiilrth,Bii

2. Know thet the Loid ie God iiHlted: With-ont our aid He did w iiiake:We ue Hie flock. Bt

2. Know thet the Loid ie God iiHlted; Witb-ont our aid He did w iiiake:We ue Hie flock, Be
PrmtM G^ifrtm whtm M hl$uin§§JbWtPraiH JBim eU §fMtur$i Acre Mew; Fruim Him e • leee fe

FiffI |i|'| ||l|Ffffifffp|ffffl

pr^ee lortii teD.Come ye be • fore Hun and re • joice.

r~ ' ^ ■ — — - — — — — p — — — — ^— — — ____ — — _ — — __ ^.-..-

doth ae feed. And for Hie ihcep He doth ne take.
k$a9*nljf Uttr, Praiu FaUur, Sra mnd J7e * IfLGhML

^^^^^

3 0 enter then Hie ^tea with joj.

Within Hie cowte Hie pr^ ptnflehn
Let thanklnl eonp jour tongnee
0 bleee and magmfy Hie nanH.

4 Becauee the Lord our God li food.

Hie mercj ie forever eve;
Hie truth at aU timee firmly elood.
And ehaO from age to afc

No. 363.

Praise God.

TImm. KcflB.

(^ Rev. Oeorgt

Praiee God trom whom all bleiiingi flow: Praiee Him aU creaturee here below; PraWe Hud ebove yi heat *vly 1

FlHK

tffttT^lt^

Pniie FMher,8oa,and Hi^ Ghoet J*raiee God troa whom a Miieiin|i flow;Pnriee Rob al

THE STRANGE YOUNG MAN 237

he portrays in the "Gilded Roll" — ^laughing always at
everything.

"How sad he seemed in his wild delight.
And how tickled indeed when he wept outright ;
What a comical man when he writhed in pain,
And how grieved he was to be glad again."

On rare occasions when he and his companions were
hilarious in the old-time charades, he

"Went round in a coat of pale pink-blue,
And a snow-white vest of crimson hue,
And trousers purple, and gaiters gray —
All cut, as the French or Dutch would say,
La — macht nichts aus, oder — dScoUetS.'*

Friends declared that he was in almost all respects
the Mr. Clickwad of the "Respectfully Declined Papers
of the Buzz Club," a fictitious series of opinions, ghastly
dreams, impromptu rhymes and literary frivolities,
that he wrote a few years later for the Indianap-
oils Saturday Herald. Often Mr. Clickwad seemed
totally oblivious of his surroundings. He would stare
blankly at the ragged gas-jet, drumming liis pencil
against his teeth. Then he would transfer his attention
to a mangy manuscript, erase a word here and there,
and drop into "a comatose condition of mentalitjr" that,
to lively companions, was aggravating in the extreme.
Mr. Clickwad was calmly accepted as a bundle of con-
tradictions. His faculty for pleasing and horrifjdng in
the same breath was simply marvelous, the informali-
ties of his fancy "being beyond cavil the most diabolic
and delightful on record."

"Notwithstanding his eccentricities," remarked a
shrewd Greenfield attorney, "Riley does know the Great
Nine. How he came to know them baffles inquiry, but
he certainly does enjoy the honor of their friendship/'

236 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

Usually, they observed, folks were happy when they
were the center of attraction. Not so with Riley.
During those intervals of absence from home (to
borrow the "corduroy" lines) :

"And when after a two weeks' vigil he returned,"
said one of his comrades, "he was still the pale, sad-
eyed subject of bewilderment, the problem Fate alone
could decipher. He had dreams that he himself but
half understood and of course none of his friends
understood/' He was the man he describes in "Fame,"
who drew

"A gloom about him like a cloak.
And wandered aimlessly. The few
Who spoke of him at all, but spoke
Disparagingly of a mind
The Fates had faultily designed:
Too indolent for modem times —
Too fanciful and full of whims —
For, talking to himself in rhjmies.
And scrawling never-heard-of hjmins,
The idle life to which he clung
Was worthless as the songs he sung!

The "strange young man" was not always melan-
choly. There were days, sometimes weeks, when he
was a perfect battery of merriment. He was a droll,
ridiculous genius, the gifted, good-for-nothing Bob

THE STRANGE YOUNG MAN 237

he portrays in the "Gilded Roll" — ^laughing always at
everything.

**How sad he seemed in his wild delight,
And how tickled indeed when he wept outright ;
What a comical man when he writhed in pain,
And how grieved he was to be glad again/'

On rare occasions when he and his companions were
hilarious in the old-time charades, he

"Went round in a coat of pale pink-blue,
And a snow-white vest of crimson hue.
And trousers purple, and gaiters gray —
All cut, as the French or Dutch would say.
La — macht nichts atis, oder — dicoUeU/^

Friends declared that he was in almost all respects
the Mr. Clickwad of the "Respectfully Declined Papers
of the Buzz Club," a fictitious series of opinions, ghastly
dreams, impromptu rhymes and literary frivolities,
that he wrote a few years later for the Indianap-
olis Saturday Herald. Often Mr. Clickwad seemed
totally oblivious of his surroundings. He would stare
blankly at the ragged gas-jet, drumming liis pencil
against his teeth. Then he would transfer his attention
to a mangy manuscript, erase a word here and there,
and drop into "a comatose condition of mentality^' that,
to lively companions, was aggravating in the extreme.
Mr. Clickwad was calmly accepted as a bundle of con-
tradictions. His faculty for pleasing and horrifying in
the same breath was simply marvelous, the informali-
ties of his fancy 'l^eing beyond cavil the most diabolic
and delightful on record."

"Notwithstanding his eccentricities," r^narked a
shrewd Greenfield attorney, "Riley does know the Great
Nine. How he came to know them baffles inquiry, but
he certainly does enjoy the honor of their friendship/'

238 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

With what excess of feeling is shown in a brief
message to Lee 0. Harris. He had "a few moments/'
he said, ''to lavish in a dissipation of thought/' Signing
himself 'Troubled Tom," he sends his Schoolmaster
a postal card to say, "I have been thinking of you all
day and wondering whether the Muse is on good terms
with you this misty weather. I have had a perfect
nighUmwre of fine frenzy" Another time he tried to
express his frenzy in verse :

"0 he was a poet weird and sad,
And life and love betimes went mad ;
He sang such songs as flame and flare
Over the wide world everywhere.
Famous was he for his wan wild eyes,
And his woeful mien and his heaving sighs."

Though wild and eccentric, though his lips were pale
beneath the lamplight,

"He sang and the lark was hushed and mute,
And the dry-goods clerk forgot his flute ;
And the night operator at the telegraph stand
Smothered his harp in his trembling hand ;
The dull and languid as they read his song,
Sighed all day and the whole night long
For a love like his and the passion warm
As the pulsing heart of the thunder-storm.*^

At another time, while visiting his Schoolmaster,
"Troubled Tom" easily convinced him that genius is a
form of insanity, particularly poetic genius. Both
agreed that there was eminent authority for the con-
clusion. Shakespeare had said that the lunatic, the
lover, and the poet were of imagination all compact.
The Schoolmaster went on to explain that men of
genius in all ages were men of strong passions. Riley
added that they were necessarily eccentric, and could

THE STRANGE YOUNG MAN 239

not by dint of any virtue travel the conventional road.
Men of average talent touched life on a few sides only.
The creative spirit was not in them. Hence they re-
garded with suspicion a man of genius who touched life
on many sides. Riley had noted in a ^'British Book"
that men dull in comprehending the eccentricities of a
great painter, set down what surpassed their own
understanding to the account of the painter's stupidity.
The Schoolmaster was of the persuasion that genius
is little in little things. ^'The mistake the people
make/' he said, ''is to attribute littleness to genius in
all things.'' Riley complained that the people lacked
impartiality of vision. Everybody in his own degree,
was drugged with his own frenzy. Why deny the
luxury to the poet? It was a matter of gradation* The
poet's frenzy was higher on the scale.

Lunatic, wise man, or poet, ''Troubled Tom" had his
defenders. By no means were "everything and every-*
body against him," as he once moaned when in a
melancholy mood. Young people were for him and
occasionally his elders. His near neighbor. Judge Good-
ing, defended him as brave Sam Johnson vindicated
Sheridan and substantially in the same language:
"There is to be sure something in the fellow," said the
Judge, "to reprehend and something to laugh at ; "but
Sir, he is not a foolish man. No, Sir ; divide mankind
into wise and foolish, and he stands considerably with-
in the ranks of the wise."

When faultfinders were numerous there was one
home where Riley never failed to find encourage-
ment. Mother Millikan, the first to forecast his liter-
ary future, had no misgivings. From that day in his
teens he crossed the threshold to find the Sketch Book
on her center table, her home had been a refuge from

240 JAMES WIIITCOMB RILEY

dejection. Her daughter, Nellie Millikan, was uni-
formly friendly and helpful. According to the aphor-
ism, ''those who befriend genius when it is struggling
for distinction, befriend the world/' Such credit be-
longs to the Millikans. Though the daughter married
and moved to another state, her faith and interest in
Riley never diminished. Her husband, George CJooley,
was equally loyal. "You have a talent,'' he wrote from
his new home in Illinois, "that is sure to meet with just
reward. Go on, my boy. I only wish it were in my
power to point you to a shorter and easier road to fame
than that you have been compelled to travel. My word
for it, the time will come when it will not be Whit
Riley but James W. Riley, Esquire, one of America's
famous poets."

Dear James," Mrs. Cooley wrote in the same letter,
you have no one left in Greenfield who takes the same
interest in you that I did or who is so proud of you
when people write me that you 'are going to the dogs/
How will they feel when the time comes that all who
know you will be so proud to take you by the hand?
The world is before you. You are standing well up on
the ladder. Grip it with a firm hand, be determined to
reach the top. You are young, almost a boy. Take
good care of your health. Do not let the late hours
that bring only an aching head the next day, steal away
your youthful strength and rob you of your brightest
thoughts. Keep them to give to the world. God bless
you."

As Riley grew in years and experience he had a great
deal to say about the well-meant intentions of friends
that were more harmful than helpful. In rhyme he
expressed himself this way:

THE STRANGE YOUNG MAN 241

"Neglected genius — ^truth be said —
As wild and quick as tinder,
The more you seek to help ahead
The more you seem to hinder."

The encouragement Nellie Millikan gave him disproved
the allegation. She did not chronicle absurdities. She
did not forget what was noble and excellent in a man.
She saw that "God twists and wrenches our evil to our
good." She saw merit in Riley's irregular, impassioned
force. Others urged him to paint signs on country
bams. She urged him to stick to his lead pencil. The
fidelity of her friendship has seldom been equaled. She
admonished her "Troubled Tom" to trust to his heart
and to what the world calls illusions.

His reply to a letter from her was characteristic of
him at that time. As usual he indulged in idle rhymes.

"You want a letter
And I've not a line of prose —
Wouldn't *jingle' answer better?
I have plenty, Gracious knows I
For my mind is running riot
With the music of the Muse."

There was a dearth of glad hearts and no sweet voice
to quiet "the restless pulse of care." The "old crowd"
was widely scattered. The ties of friendship were
tattered and raveled at the ends, and the social circle
was dimmer

'Than a rainy afternoon.
And sheds a thinner glimmer
Than the ring around the moon."

The past was like a story to which he had listened in a
dream, he went on in a metrical moan. It was vanish-
ing in the glory of the early morning. Glancing at his
shadow he felt the loss of strength YfhUe the Day of

242 JAMES WHITCOMB BILET

Life was advancing. The flij^t of time save
scarcely a moment 'to trip it with a rhyme." Never-
theless he really did believe his ''fame was growing
stronger'' ;

''And though he fell below it.
He might know as much of mirth.
To live and die a poet
Of unacknowledged worth ;
For Fame is but a vagrant.
Though a loyal one and brave,
And her laurels ne'er so fragrant
As when scattered o'er the grave."

A friend once remarked that ''Riley is one of
those men who appear to be bom what they are hf
some accident of nature." Riley was different To
begin with, he refused to be bom "according to
the tradition of the register books." Following a
youthful fancy, he made a little memoir of himself and
changed the year of his birth from 1849 to 1853, adopt-
ing the whim of Henry Fuseli, the eccentric painter,
who changed his birth year from 1741 to 1745. At
first a mere freak, it became in later years a matter of
serious consideration when he grew sensitive on the
question of his age. The freak was a source of amfa-
sion to his friends. They wrote for the facts:

"Mr. James W. Riley, the man of great mirth,
Give us the day and the date of your birth;
We are anxious to know when you came to tfaJ^
Of the heavenly planets and the zodiac's girtb

He dodged the planets, humored his whim
an evasive answer.

He was different When a boy he ref
through the straight jacket system of e
ever that system gave scope to '

THE STRANGE YOUNG MAN 243

-*^ too seldom he thought for his advancement — he
was its willing votary. But when it addressed him
exactly in the same manner and with the same stand-
ards it addressed other boys, his heart organized an
insurrection. In the Shoe-Shop he was warned of the
danger of reducing education to "the careless, fitful
spirit of a gamester who felt that he was a part of a
great gaming system." He once remarked of a little
flock of visitors, **I can not endure them ; fhey are all
alike — all of one order — one habit of thought. I feel
like a wildcat among them." '1 can remember/' he said
when grown to maturity, "when I, through some
strange hallucination that victimized me for a season,
had a desire to be just like everybody else. I was
afraid somebody would think I was peculiar. I lived
down in a little country village and was ashamed to let
folks know I lived there. I did not fool anybody.
Everybody knew that I was from Greenfield. If I were
a countryman and had lived on an eighty-acre farm aU
my life and had never been off it, I would brag about
that farm. I would swear it was the most beautiful
piece of property under the light of heaven. If men
doubted it I would tell them to live a lifetime on just
such a farm and then they would know."

He was different. At a "skating bee" on the Missis-
sinewa River, while the tide of glee slid merrily on, he
sat on the bank, all alone. Skaters came to him with
their zestful song:

"0 come with us and we will go
And try the winter's cold, sir ;
Nor fear the ice, nor fear the snoWy
For we are tough and bold, sir."

In vain. He preferred the company of his own
thoughts. "Think of it," Bill Nye remarked at a

244 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

later period, ''there he was, just a sliver in the great
wood-pile of creation, yet fancying he heard music
from the breakers far away on the restless, rising sea
of ambition,"

He was different — ^unfit for the confusion of the
world yet having an intimate knowledge of it. He
knew things by intuition. ''Speaking of intuitions," he
said in an interview of his later years, giving a por-
trait of himself, "I knew a fellow back in my native
town. His name— -well, he had a law office witii a bay-
window on the second floor of a building on Main
Street. He was a quiet chap ; he used to have intuitions
and premonitions and all that sort of thing; he had
quite a reputation for them. Time and again when he
saw a stranger crossing the street, he would tell exactly
to what building and to what office he was going,— and
his forecast was usually correct.

"Well, he was sitting in his window one day medi-
tating, like Mark Twain's frog, when he noticed a crowd
of loafers gathering in front of a building across the
way. They began to gaze dreamily up at a man on a
stepladder, who, with his back to them, was swinging
up a shop sign. They all stood there, quiet and silent,
with their hands behind their backs when he remarked
to the men in his office that he could cause a stir among
the dreamers, yet he would not say anything or do
anjrthing other than go over among them for a moment.
Then he put himself under his hat, stuffed his hands in
his pockets, went down-stairs, crossed the street and
lazily slipped in among the gazers. No one moved, no
one noticed him ; every one seemed to be in a trance.
After a minute he began softly to whistle an old famil-
iar hymn, 'Shall We Gather at the River.' He stopped
at the end of the second line. A man behind him un-

THE STRANGE YOUNG MAK 245

consciously took up the tune and carried it along and
then anottier caught on, and another, and soon the
whole crowd was whistling softly or half humming the
melody — ^the inoculator in the meantime returning to
his law office. By and by the man with the sign started
to join in unconsciously, but for some reason could not
quite catch the thread of the tune. That took his mind
off his work, and since his work at that moment con-
sisted in balancing the heavy sign on one nail and him-
self on one foot, the result was speedy demoralization.
The sign tumbled down, he narrowly escaped death,
besides damaging the eye of a spectator.''

Here, in a trivial incident of the street, is a glimpse
of Riley's power over the hearts of men. "How did you
do that, James?" asked his associates in the office.
James did not know. It was a mystery, just as years
afterward his power over an audience was a mystery.
Nevertheless ''the spells of persuasion, the keys of
power" were put into his hands. He was so

"Self -centered, that when he launched the magic word.
It shook or captivated all who heard."

"Robert CoUyer," said an Indiana clergsonan, "can
find abundance of material in Greenfield for his lecture
on 'Blunders of Genius/ " The remark was occasioned
by Riley's declining to quit his "literary den" to attend
a revival. He was different He stood alone and thus
provoked a sharp criticism from the evangelist, but he
fared no better and no worse, it seems, than young Pro-
fessor Longfellow, whose failure to attend a "pro-
tracted meeting" met with similar disapproval. "I
struck my critic," said Riley, "in the small of the back
with a large chunk of silence. I had my pulpit and
Brother Doe had his."

246 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

It may be said here parenthetically, that quite early
in his career Riley reached the conclusion that a man's
greatness did not consist in believing a thing because
it was popular. Ofttimes, as he saw it, it was his duty
to stand for a thing when "all the cry of voices was on
the other side." Soon after he reached his majority,
he found a paragraph in Hearth and Home, an editorial
note by Ik Marvel, which served him as a standard of
living almost two score and ten years. '^A man's true
greatness,'' wrote Marvel, ''lies in the consciousness
of an honest purpose through life, founded on a just
estimate of himself and everything else, on frequent
self-examination, and a steady obedience to the rule
which he knows to be right, without troubling himself
about what others may think or say, or whether they
do or do not do that which he thinks and says and
does."

'Troubled Tom" was such a strange young man. The
more abstruse his lines, the more certainly he charac-
terized himself:

"He would chant of the golden wheat
And then trill a biscuit-song as sweet

As poets ever know.
Then write a rhyme on theme sublime^
And then twirl his pen as of yore
And write a lay in his wildest way
Of a rival grocery store."

He unraveled wild and wanton fantasies from most
improbable sources. "They were designed," he wrote,

"By cunning of the spider brain —
A tangle-work of tissue, wrought
And woven, in an hour of pain.
To trap the giddy flies of thought."

The image of himself doing strange things in uncom-

THE STRANGE YOUNG MAN 247

mon places was startling. Sometimes he was a
truant schoolboy with a paper kite in the sky, "unwind-
ing syllables of gossamer in glimmering threads of
speech, and leaving at their ends shadowy thoughts
that lost themselves in the fleecy clouds." Sometimes
he was a cast-away "unlocking captive lays from the
dungeon of his dismal heart that

Would make the world turn wonderingly around,
And slake its thirsty ear with harmony."

Sometimes he was a desolate dwarf on the coast of a
fl3dng island,

'Where only remorse in pent agony lives
To dread tike advice that his grandmother gives.''

Such a strange young man. He wanted to idle away
weeks and write in some obscure hotel room, or in the
shade of the Brandywine elms, but such a boon the
Fates denied him. "It was not like Hamlet," he said,
"just a debate in my mind what to do. I literally had
to take up arms against a sea of troubles. I had to
suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune."
The arrows were often nothing more than a confusion
of ideas concerning the properties, but the confusion
was an affliction to him, and it turned out — a plague for
life. His clothes were not cut in the latest style.
Women thought he should be at their command.
He should while away the rosy hours in amuse-
ment. He should talk sentiment. Not at all,
thought he. So he set about doing unaccountable
things. He discounted the moon; he forgot to play;
he worked at night and slept in the morning. Un-
willing to countenance his infringements of custom,
his companions soon gave him up as an incorrigible.

236 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

Usually, they observed, folks were happy when they
were the center of attraction. Not so with Riley.
During those intervals of absence from home (to
borrow the "corduroy" lines) :

"He lingered and delayed,
And kept his friends away ;
Shut himself within his room and stayed
A-writing there from day to day ;
He kept a-getting stranger still,
And thinner all the time,
You know, as any fellow will.
On nothing else but rhyme/'

"A gloom about him like a cloak.
And wandered aimlessly. The few
Who spoke of him at all, but spoke
Disparagingly of a mind
The Fates had faultily designed:
Too indolent for modem times —
Too fanciful and full of whims —
For, talking to himself in rhjmies,
And scrawling never-heard-of hymns.
The idle life to which he clung
Was worthless as the songs he sung !"

The "strange young man" was not always melan-
choly. There were days, sometimes weeks, when he
was a perfect battery of merriment. He was a droll,
ridiculous genius, the gifted, good-for-nothing Bob

THE STRANGE YOUNG MAN 237

he portrays in the "Gilded Roll" — ^laughing always at
everything.

''How sad he seemed in his wild delight,
And how tickled indeed when he wept outright ;
What a comical man when he writhed in pain,
And how grieved he was to be glad again/'

On rare occasions when he and his companions were
hilarious in the old-time charades, he

"Went round in a coat of pale pink-blue,
And a snow-white vest of crimson hue,
And trousers purple, and gaiters gray —
All cut, as the French or Dutch would say,
Lor—^macht nichts aus, oder — dScoUetS.^^

Friends declared that he was in almost all respects
the Mr. Clickwad of the "Respectfully Declined Papers
of the Buzz Club," a fictitious series of opinions, ghastly
dreams, impromptu rhymes and literary frivolities,
that he wrote a few years later for the Indianap-
olis Saturday Herald. Often Mr. Clickwad seemed
totally oblivious of his surroundings. He would stare
blankly at the ragged gas-jet, drumming his pencil
against his teeth. Then he would transfer his attention
to a mangy manuscript, erase a word here and there,
and drop into "a comatose condition of mentality" that,
to lively companions, was aggravating in the extreme.
Mr. Clickwad was calmly accepted as a bundle of con-
tradictions. His faculty for pleasing and horrifying in
the same breath was simply marvelous, the informali-
ties of his fancy "being beyond cavil the most diabolic
and delightful on record."

288 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

With what excess of feeling is shown in a brief
message to Lee 0. Harris. He had "a few moments,"
he said, ''to lavish in a dissipation of thought/' Signing
himself "Troubled Tom," he sends his Schoolmaster
a postal card to say, ''I have been thinking of you all
day and wondering whether the Muse is on good terms
with you this misty weather. I have had a perfect
night-mcure of fine frenzy.*^ Another time he tried to
express his frenzy in verse :

"0 he was a poet weird and sad.
And life and love betimes went mad ;
He sang such songs as flame and flare
Over the wide world everywhere.
Famous was he for his wan wild eyes,
And his woeful mien and his heaving sighs."

Though wild and eccentric, though his lips were pale
beneath the lamplight,

''He sang and the lark was hushed and mute,
And the dry-goods clerk forgot his flute ;
And the night operator at the telegraph stand
Smothered his harp in his trembling hand ;
The dull and languid as they read his song.
Sighed all day and the whole night long
For a love like his and the passion warm
As the pulsing heart of the thunder-storm/'

At another time, while visiting his Schoolmaster,
'Troubled Tom" easily convinced him that genius is a
form of insanity, particularly poetic genius. Both
agreed that there was eminent authority for the con-
clusion. Shakespeare had said that the lunatic, the
lover, and the poet were of imagination all compact.
The Schoolmaster went on to explain that men of
genius in all ages were men of strong passions. Riley
added that they were necessarily eccentric, and could

THE STRANGE YOUNG MAN 239

not by dint of any virtue travel the conventional road.
Men of average talent touched life on a few sides only.
The creative spirit was not in them. Hence they re-
garded with suspicion a man of genius who touched life
on many sides. Riley had noted in a '^British Book''
that men dull in comprehending the eccentricities of a
great painter, set down what surpassed their own
understanding to the account of the painter's stupidity.
The Schoolmaster was of the persuasion that genius
is little in little things. ''The mistake the people
make/' he said, ''is to attribute littleness to genius in
all things." Riley complained that the people lacked
impartiality of vision. Everybody in his own degree,
was drugged with his own frenzy. Why deny the
luxury to the poet? It was a matter of gradation. The
poet's frenzy was higher on the scale.

Lunatic, wise man, or poet, "Troubled Tom" had his
defenders. By no means were "everything and every-
body against him," as he once moaned when in a
melancholy mood. Young people were for him and
occasionally his elders. His near neighbor. Judge Good-
ing, defended him as brave Sam Johnson vindicated
Sheridan and substantially in the same language:
"There is to be sure something in the fellow," said the
Judge, "to reprehend and something to laugh at ; "but
Sir, he is not a foolish man. No, Sir ; divide mankind
into wise and foolish, and he stands considerably with-
in the ranks of the wise."

240 JAMES WIIITCOMB RILEY

dejection. Her daughter, Nellie Millikan, was uni-
formly friendly and helpful. According to the aphor-
ism, ''those who befriend genius when it is struggling
for distinction, befriend the world/' Such credit be-
longs to the Millikans. Though the daughter married
and moved to another state, her faith and interest in
Riley never diminished. Her husband, George Cooley,
was equally loyal. "You have a talent," he wrote from
his new home in Illinois, ''that is sure to meet with just
reward. Go on, my boy. I only wish it were in my
power to point you to a shorter and easier road to fame
than that you have been compelled to travel. My word
for it, the time will come when it will not be Whit
Riley but James W. Riley, Esquire, one of America's
famous poets.''

"Dear James," Mrs. Cooley wrote in the same letter,
"you have no one left in Greenfield who takes the same
interest in you that I did or who is so proud of you
when people write me that you 'are going to the dogs.'
How will they feel when the time comes that all who
know you will be so proud to take you by the hand?
The world is before you. You are standing well up on
the ladder. Grip it with a firm hand, be determined to
reach the top. You are young, almost a boy. Take
good care of your health. Do not let the late hours
that bring only an aching head the next day, steal away
your youthful strength and rob you of your brightest
thoughts. Keep them to give to the world. God bless
you."

As Riley grew in years and experience he had a great
deal to say about the well-meant intentions of fri^ads
that were more harmful than helpful. In rhyme he
expressed himself this way:

THE STRANGE YOUNG MAN 241

**Neglected genius — ^truth be said —
As wild and quick as tinder.
The more you seek to help ahead
The more you seem to hinder."

His reply to a letter from her was characteristic of
him at that time. As usual he indulged in idle rhymes.

"You want a letter
And I've not a line of prose —
Wouldn't * jingle' answer better?
I have plenty, Gracious knows !
For my mind is running riot
With the music of the Muse."

"Than a rainy afternoon.
And sheds a thinner glimmer
Than the ring around the moon.**

242 JAMES WHTTCOMB RILEY

Life was advancing. The flight of time gave him
scarcely a moment **to trip it with a rhjmie/' Never-
theless he really did believe his ''fame was growing
stronger

"And though he fell below it,
He might know as much of mirth.
To live and die a poet
Of unacknowledged worth ;
For Fame is but a vagrant,
Though a loyal one and brave.
And her laurels ne'er so fragrant
As when scattered o'er the grave."

A friend once remarked that ''Riley is one of
those men who appear to be bom what they are by
some accident of nature." Riley was diflferent To
begin with, he refused to be bom "according to
the tradition of the register books." Following a
youthful fancy, he made a little memoir of himself and
changed the year of his birth from 1849 to 1853, adopt-
ing the whim of Henry Fuseli, the eccentric painter,
who changed his birth year from 1741 to 1745. At
first a mere freak, it became in later years a matter of
serious consideration when he grew sensitive on the
question of his age. The freak was a source of confu-
sion to his friends. They wrote for the facts:

"Mr. James W. Riley, the man of great mirth.
Give us the day and the date of your birth ;
We are anxious to know when you came to this earth.
Of the heavenly planets and the zodiac's girth."

He dodged the planets, humored his whim and returned
an evasive answer.

He was different. When a boy he refused to be put
through the straight jacket system of education. When-
ever that system gave scope to his individuality

THE STRANGE YOUNG MAN 243

— an too seldom he thought for his advancement — he
was its willing votary. But when it addressed him
exactly in the same manner and with the same stand-
ards it addressed other boys, his heart organized an
insurrection. In the Shoe-Shop he was warned of the
danger of reducing education to ''the careless, fitful
spirit of a gamester who felt that he was a part of a
great gaming system.'' He once remarked of a little
flock of visitors, ''I can not endure them ; they are all
alike — all of one order — one habit of thought. I feel
like a wildcat among them." "I can remember," he said
when grown to maturity, "when I, through some
strange hallucination that victimized me for a season,
had a desire to be just like everybody else. I was
afraid somebody would think I was peculiar. I lived
down in a little country village and was ashamed to let
folks know I lived there. I did not fool anybody.
Everybody knew that I was from Greenfield. If I were
a countryman and had lived on an eighty-acre farm all
my life and had never been off it, I would brag about
that farm. I would swear it was the most beautiful
piece of property under the light of heaven. If men
doubted it I would tell them to live a lifetime on just
such a farm and then they would know."

He was different. At a ''skating bee" on the Missis-
sinewa River, while the tide of glee slid merrily on, he
sat on the bank, all alone. Skaters came to him with
their zestful song:

"0 come with us and we will go
And try the winter's cold, sir ;
Nor fear the ice, nor fear the snow.
For we are tough and bold, sir."

In vain. He preferred the company of his own
thoughts. "Think of it," Bill Nye remarked at a

244 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

later period, ''there he was, just a sliver in the great
wood-pile of creation, yet fancying he heard music
from the breakers far away on the restless, rising sea
of ambition."

He was different — ^unfit for the confusion of the
world yet having an intimate knowledge of it. He
knew things by intuition. "Speaking of intuitions," he
said in an interview of his later years, giving a por-
trait of himself, **l knew a fellow back in my native
town. His name— well, he had a law office witili a bay-
window on the second floor of a building on Main
Street. He was a quiet chap ; he used to have intuitions
and premonitions and all that sort of thing; he had
quite a reputation for them. Time and again when he
saw a stranger crossing the street, he would tell exactly
to what building and to what office he was going, — and
his forecast was usually correct.

"Well, he was sitting in his window one day medu
toting, like Mark Twain's frog, when he noticed a crowd
of loafers gathering in front of a building across the
way. They began to gaze dreamily up at a man on a
stepladder, who, with his back to them, was swinging
up a shop sign. They all stood there, quiet and silent,
with their hands behind their backs when he remarked
to the men in his office that he could cause a stir among
the dreamers, yet he would not say anything or do
anything other than go over among them for a moment.
Then he put himself under his hat, stuffed his hands in
his pockets, went down-stairs, crossed the street and
lazily slipped in among the gazers. No one moved, no
one noticed him ; every one seemed to be in a trance.
After a minute he began softly to whistle an old famil-
iar hymn, 'Shall We Gather at the River.' He stopped
at the end of the second line. A man behind him un-

THE STRANGE YOUNG MAN 245

consciously took up the tune and carried it along and
then another caught on, and another, and soon the
whole crowd was whistling softly or half humming the
melody — ^the inoculator in the meantime returning to
his law office. By and by the man with the sign started
to join in unconsciously, but for some reason could not
quite catch the thread of the tune. That took his mind
off his work, and since his work at that moment con-
sisted in balancing the heavy sign on one nail and him-
self on one foot, the result was speedy demoralization.
The sign tumbled down, he narrowly escaped death,
besides damaging the eye of a spectator/'

Here, in a trivial incident of the street, is a glimpse
of Riley's power over the hearts of men. "How did you
do that, James?'' asked his associates in the office.
James did not know. It was a mystery, just as years
afterward his power over an audience was a mystery.
Nevertheless "the spells of persuasion, the keys of
power" were put into his hands. He was so

"Self -centered, that when he launched the magic word.
It shook or captivated all who heard."

"Robert CoUyer," said an Indiana clergyman, "can
find abundance of material in Greenfield for his lecture
on 'Blunders of Genius.' " The remark was occasioned
by Riley's declining to quit his "literary den" to attend
a revival. He was different He stood alone and thus
provoked a sharp criticism from the evangelist, but he
fared no better and no worse, it seems, than young Pro-
fessor Longfellow, whose failure to attend a "pro-
tracted meeting" met with similar disapproval. "I
struck my critic," said Riley, "in the small of the back
with a large chunk of silence. I had my pulpit and
Brother Doe had his."

246 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

It may be said here parenthetically, that quite early
in his career Riley reached the conclusion that a man's
greatness did not consist in believing a thing because
it was popular. Ofttimes, as he saw it, it was his duty
to stand for a thing when ''all the cry of voices was on
the other side/' Soon after he reached his majority,
he found a paragraph in Hearth and Home, an editorial
note by Ik Marvel, which served him as a standard of
living almost two score and ten years. ''A man's true
greatness," wrote Marvel, 'lies in the consciousness
of an honest purpose through life, founded on a just
estimate of himself and everything else, on frequent
self-examination, and a steady obedience to the rule
which he knows to be right, without troubling himself
about what others may think or say, or whether they
do or do not do that which he thinks and says and
does."

"Troubled Tom" was such a strange young man. The
more abstruse his lines, the more certainly he charao-
terized himself:

"He would chant of the golden wheat
And then trill a biscuit-song as sweet

As poets ever know.
Then write a rhyme on theme sublime^
And then twirl his pen as of yore
And write a lay in his wildest way
Of a rival grocery store."

He unraveled wild and wanton fantasies from most
improbable sources. "They were designed," he wrote,

"By cunning of the spider brain —
A tangle-work of tissue, wrought
And woven, in an hour of pain,
To trap the giddy flies of thought."

The image of himself doing strange things in uncom-

THE STRANGE YOUNG MAN 247

mon places was startling. Sometimes he was a
truant schoolboy with a paper kite in the sky, ''unwind-
ing syllables of gossamer in glimmering threads of
speech, and leaving at their ends shadowy thoughts
that lost themselves in the fleecy clouds/' Sometimes
he was a cast-away ''unlocking captive lays from the
dungeon of his dismal heart that

Would make the world turn wonderingly around,
And slake its thirsty ear with harmony/'

Sometimes he was a desolate dwarf on the coast of a
fl3dng island,

"Where only remorse in pent agony livefi
To dread the advice that his grandmother gives.''

Such a strange young man. He wanted to idle away
weeks and write in some obscure hotel room, or in the
shade of the Brandywine elms, but such a boon the
Fates denied him. "It was not like Hamlet," he said,
"just a debate in my mind what to do. I literally had
to take up arms against a sea of troubles. I had to
suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.''
The arrows were often nothing more than a confusion
of ideas concerning the properties, but the confusion
was an affliction to him, and it turned out — a plague for
life. His clothes were not cut in the latest style.
Women thought he should be at their command.
He should while away the rosy hours in amuse-
ment. He should talk sentiment. Not at all,
thought he. So he set about doing unaccountable
things. He discounted the moon; he forgot to play;
he worked at night and slept in the morning. Un-
willing to countenance his infringements of custom,
his companions soon gave him up as an incorrigible.

248 JAMES WHTTCOMB RILEY

To add to his discomfort, he lost control of his temper^
when some defiance of his wishes seemed to justify
anger, and frequently (as he discovered on reflection)
when there was no possible justification. ''The extra
lemon/' said his friend, Myron Reed, "that had been
squeezed into the nectar of his disposition damaged
its flavor/^

He would pick up slips of paper in stores or oflSces
to keep in his pocket for lead pencil memoranda. He
made notes while other men worked and thus was fre-
quently pointed out as a lounger. When the days were
long he sought sequestered places in the thickets and
fallen tree-tops, and he once remained hidden away in
the woods in spite of the on-coming rain.

'In those rare odd times, in his better moods
Some rustic verses to him were bom.
That would live, perchance, in their native woods,
As long as the crows that pull the com.''

As the days went by, a lowering shroud of dreams en-
folded him. There were plaints instead of rejoicing,
and "one dismal evening," (he wrote in the gloom)
"when the grimy hand of dusk was wiping out the day
with spongy clouds, he let the fire die out in his room
and refused to light the lamp, declaring that the bur-
den was heavier than he could bear." What, he won-
dered, was to keep his heart warm when friends de-
serted him, when birds declined to sing, when diflSculty
seemed a mountain and success a foothill, when he
sat in silence and gazed at the sky through the window
"like one who hears it rain"?

"Many men," he remarked half-seriously a decade
after his dismal experience, "live in a community for
years and years, carefully concealing the latent poetry
in their hearts, and pass for reputable citizens ; but it

CffM^EE3J

THE STRANGE YOUNG MAN 249

was my fate by an unfortunate current of events very
early in my career to be betrayed and branded as a
poet"

In that period of heart-heaviness lie was seddng
a friendship that would deeply share his joys and sor-
rows. He would compass the miracle of true affection.
He had a surplus of professional friends whose oblique
remonstrations "were deeper injuries than the down-
right blows of an enemy.'' Where was the man who
would lay down his life, if it be necessary, for his
friend? The heroic example of Damon and Pythias
was largely fiction. It should be truth, he thought, the
common behavior of mankind. He was seeking the
Thousandth Man —

'TTie Thousandth Man will stand your friend
With the whole round world ag'in you.*'

You can show him your feelings. He will bide the
shame of mockery and laughter. He will stick closer
to you than a brother. Riley's hunger for friendship
was the same unsatisfied longing he once attributed to
the heart of a woman:

**Where art thou, Love, still lost to me
In unknown deeps of destiny?
Thou man of men the fates design
For me ! I reach my hands for thine
Across the darkness, and I moan
My love out all alone — alone.

"But yesterday one blithe of tongue.
An heir of fortune, fair and young.
Walked with me down tiie gleaming sands.
And of a sudden caught my hands
And held them, saying 'All mine own !'
And yet alone — alone — ^I walked alone."

250 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

He was not only a strange young man but he
was a strange middle-aged man and a strange old
man (if it may be said he grew old) . There was an-
other Riley back of the visible one which nobody ever
saw; associates saw the smiling face or the "iron
mask," but no one ever saw "the light behind the brow/'
"Away inside of the internal man," said he, "is another
man and that man is so superior to the inferior one in
front of him that he shades his eyes with his arm to
hide the blush and shame. The altitude of the superior
man is so great that the inferior can not reach high
enough to touch him."

To Rilqr's way of thinking, friendship was as inex-
plicable as poetry. Efforts to explain it were futile.
From Cicero to Emerson it was largely a matter of
speculation. Who could write the history of love? —
and friendship without love was as barren as the coast
of Enderby Land. A passage attributed to Gail Ham-
ilton expressed his view with accuracy sufficient for
quotation. "There is no such thing," says she* "as
knowing a man intimately. Every soul is, for the
greater part of its mortal life, isolated from every
other. Whether it dwells in the Garden of Eden or the
Desert of Sahara, it dwells alone. Not only do we
jostle against the street-crowd unknowing and un-
known, but we go out and come in, we lie down and rise
up, with Strangers. Jupiter and Neptune sweep the
heavens not more unfamiliar to us than the worlds that
circle our hearthstone. Day after day, and year after
year, a person moves by our side; he sits at the same
table ; he reads the same books ; he kneels in the same
church. We speak to him ; his soul comes out into the
vestibule to answer us, and returns — and the gates are

THE STRANGE YOUNG MAN 251

shut; therein we can not enter. We were discussing
the state of the country ; but when we ceased, he opened
a postern gate, went down a bank, and launched on a
sea over whose waters we have no boat to sail, no star
to guide."

242 JAMES WHTTCOMB RILEY

Life was advancing. The flight of time gave him
scarcely a moment "to trip it with a rhyme." Never-
theless he really did believe his "fame was growing
stronger" ;

"And though he fell below it.
He might know as much of mirth.
To live and die a poet
Of unacknowledged worth ;
For Fame is but a vagrant.
Though a loyal one and brave,
And her laurels ne'er so fragrant
As when scattered o'er the grave."

A friend once remarked that "Riley is one of
those men who appear to be bom what they are by
some accident of nature." Riley was different. To
begin with, he refused tx> be bom "according to
the tradition of the register books." Following a
youthful fancy, he made a little memoir of himself and
changed the year of his birth from 1849 to 1853, adopt-
ing the whim of Henry Fuseli, the eccentric painter,
who changed his birth year from 1741 to 1745. At
first a mere freak, it became in later years a matter of
serious consideration when he grew sensitive on the
question of his age. The freak was a source of confu-
sion to his friends. They wrote for the facts:

"Mr. James W. Riley, the man of great mirth,
Give us the day and the date of your birth ;
We are anxious to know when you came to this earth.
Of the heavenly planets and the zodiac's girth."

He dodged the planets, humored his whim and returned
an evasive answer.

He was different. When a boy he refused to be put
through the straight jacket system of education. When-
ever that system gave scope to his individuality

THE STRANGE YOUNG MAN 243

— «II too seldom he thought for his advancement — ^he
was its willing votary. But when it addressed him
exactly in the same manner and with the same stand-
ards it addressed other boys, his heart organized an
insurrection. In the Shoe-Shop he was warned of the
danger of reducing education to ''the careless, fitful
spirit of a gamester who felt that he was a part of a
great gaming system." He once remarked of a little
flock of visitors, ''I can not endure them ; they are all
alike — all of one order — one habit of thought. I feel
like a wildcat among them." "I can remember," he said
when grown to maturity, "when I, through some
strange hallucination that victimized me for a season,
had a desire to be just like everybody else. I was
afraid somebody would think I was peculiar. I lived
down in a little country village and was ashamed to let
folks know I lived there. I did not fool anybody.
Everybody knew that I was from Greenfield. If I were
a countryman and had lived on an eighty-acre farm all
my life and had never been off it, I would brag about
that farm. I would swear it was the most beautiful
piece of property under the light of heaven. If men
doubted it I would tell them to live a lifetime on jiist
such a farm and then they would know."

He was different. At a ''skating bee" on the Missis-
sinewa River, while the tide of glee slid merrily on, he
sat on the bank, all alone. Skaters came to him with
their zestf ul song :

"0 come with us and we will go
And try the winter's cold, sir ;
Nor fear the ice, nor fear the snow^
For we are tough and bold, sir."

In vain. He preferred the company of his own
thoughts. "Think of it," Bill Nye remarked at a

244 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

later period, "there he was, just a sliver in the great
wood-pile of creation, yet fancying he heard music
from the breakers far away on the restless, rising sea
of ambition."

He was different — unfit for the confusion of the
world yet having an intimate knowledge of it. He
knew things by intuition. ''Speaking of intuitions," he
said in an interview of his later years, giving a por-
trait of himself, '1 knew a fellow back in my native
town. His name— well, he had a law office with a bay-
window on the second floor of a building on Main
Street. He was a quiet chap ; he used to have intuitions
and premonitions and all that sort of thing; he had
quite a reputation for them. Time and again when he
saw a stranger crossing the street, he would tell exactly
to what building and to what office he was going, — and
his forecast was usually correct.

THE STRANGE YOUNG MAN 245

consciously took up the tune and carried it along and
then another caught on, and another, and soon the
whole crowd was whistling softly or half humming the
melody — ^the inoculator in the meantime rletuming to
his law office. By and by the man with the sign started
to join in unconsciously, but for some reason could not
quite catch the thread of the tune. That took his mind
off his work, and since his work at that moment con-
sisted in balancing the heavy sign on one nail and him«
self on one foot, the result was speedy demoralization.
The sign tumbled down, he narrowly escaped death,
besides damaging the eye of a spectator."

Here, in a trivial incident of the street, is a glimpse
of Riley's power over the hearts of men. "How did you
do that, James?" asked his associates in the office.
James did not know. It was a mystery, just as years
afterward his power over an audience was a mystery.
Nevertheless "the spells of persuasion, the keys of
power" were put into his hands. He was so

"Self -centered, that when he launched the magic word.
It shook or captivated all who heard."

"Robert CoUyer," said an Indiana clergjmian, "can
find abundance of material in Greenfield for his lecture
on 'Blunders of Genius.' " The remark was occasioned
by Riley's declining to quit his "literary den" to attend
a revival. He was different. He stood alone and thus
provoked a sharp criticism from the evangelist, but he
fared no better and no worse, it seems, than young Pro-
fessor Longfellow, whose failure to attend a "pro-
tracted meeting" met with similar disapproval. "I
struck my critic," said Riley, "in the small of the back
with a large chunk of silence. I had my pulpit and
Brother Doe had his."

246 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

It may be said here parenthetically, that quite early
in his career Ril^y reached the conclusion that a man's
greatness did not consist in believing a thing because
it was popular. Ofttimes, as he saw it, it was his duty
to stand for a thing when ''all the cry of voices was on
the other side/' Soon after he reached his majority,
he found a paragraph in Hearth and Home, an editorial
note by Ik Marvel, which served him as a standard of
living almost two score and ten years. ''A man's true
greatness," wrote Marvel, "lies in the consciousness
of an honest purpose through life, founded on a just
estimate of himself and everything else, on frequent
self-examination, and a steady obedience to the rule
which he knows to be right, without troubling himself
about what others may think or say, or whether they
do or do not do that which he thinks and says and
does."

"Troubled Tom" was such a strange young man. The
more abstruse his lines, the more certainly he charao*
terized himself :

"He would chant of the golden wheat
And then trill a biscuit-song as sweet

As poets ever know.
Then write a rhyme on theme sublime^
And then twirl his pen as of yore
And write a lay in his wildest way
Of a rival grocery store."

He unraveled wild and wanton fantasies from most
improbable sources. "They were designed," he wrote,

"By cunning of the spider brain —
A tangle-work of tissue, wrought
And woven, in an hour of pain.
To trap the giddy flies of thought."

The image of himself doing strange things in uncom-

THE STRANGE YOUNG MAN 247

mon places was startling. Sometimes he was a
truant schoolboy with a paper kite in the sky, "unwind-
ing syllables of gossamer in glinmiering threads of
speech, and leaving at their ends shadowy thoughts
that lost themselves in the fleecy clouds." Sometimes
he was a cast-away "unlocking captive lays from the
dungeon of his dismal heart that

Would make the world turn wonderingly around,
And slake its thirsty ear with harmony."

Sometimes he was a desolate dwarf on the coast of a
flying island,

"Where only remorse in pent agony lives
To dread the advice that his grandmother gives.''

Such a strange young man. He wanted to idle away
weeks and write in some obscure hotel room, or in the
shade of the Brand3rwine elms, but such a boon the
Fates denied him. "It was not like Hamlet," he said,
"just a debate in my mind what to do. I literally had
to take up arms against a sea of troubles. I had to
suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune."
The arrows were often nothing more than a confusion
of ideas concerning the properties, but the confusion
was an affliction to him, and it turned out — a plague for
life. His clothes were not cut in the latest style.
Women thought he should be at their command.
He should while away the rosy hours in amuse-
ment. He should talk sentiment. Not at all,
thought he. So he set about doing unaccountable
things. He discounted the moon; he forgot to play;
he worked at night and slept in the morning. Un-
willing to countenance his infringements of custom,
his companions soon gave him up as an incorrigible.

248 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

To add to his discomf ort^ he lost control of his temper,
when some defiance of his wishes seemed to justify
anger, and frequently (as he discovered on reflection)
when there was no possible justification. ''The extra
lemon/' said his friend, Myron Reed, ''that had been
squeezed into the nectar of his disposition damaged
its flavor."

He would pick up slips of paper in stores or offices
to keep in his pocket for lead pencil memoranda. He
made notes while other men tuorked and thus was fre-
quently pointed out as a lounger. When the days were
long he sought sequestered places in the thickets and
fallen tree-tops, and he once remained hidden away in
the woods in spite of the on-coming rain.

"In those rare odd times, in his better moods
Some rustic verses to him were bom.
That would live, perchance, in their native woods.
As long as the crows that pull the com."

As the days went by, a lowering shroud of dreams en-
folded him. There were plaints instead of rejoicing,
and "one dismal evening," (he wrote in the gloom)
"when the grimy hand of dusk was wiping out the day
with spongy clouds, he let the fire die out in his room
and refused to light the lamp, declaring that the bur-
den was heavier than he could bear." What, he won-
dered, was to keep his heart warm when friends de-
serted him, when birds declined to sing, when difficulty
seemed a mountain and success a foothill, when he
sat in silence and gazed at the sky through the window
"like one who hears it rain"?

"Many men," he remarked half-seriously a decade
after his dismal experience, "live in a communily for
years and years, carefully concealing the latent poetry
in their hearts, and pass for reputable citizens ; but it

I'liliitfHl I..V Ulley 111 ISi'a

THE STRANGE YOUNG MAN 249

was my fate by an unfortunate current of events very
early in my career to be betrayed and branded as a
poet"

In that period of heart-heaviness lie was seeking:
a friendship that would deeply share his joys and sor-
rows. He would compass the miracle of true affection.
He had a surplus of professional friends whose oblique
remonstrations 'Vere deeper injuries than the down-
right blows of an enemy." Where was the man who
would lay down his life, if it be necessary, for his
friend? The heroic example of Damon and Pythias
was largely fiction. It should be truth, he thought, the
common behavior of mankind. He was seeking the
Thousandth Man —

'The Thousandth Man will stand your friend
With the whole round world ag'in you."

But yesterday one blithe of tongue.
An heir of fortune, fair and young.
Walked with me down the gleaming sands,
And of a sudden caught my hands
And held them, sajring 'All mine own I'
And yet alone — alone — ^I walked alone."

250 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

He was not only a strange young man but he
was a strange middle-aged man and a strange old
man (if it may be said he grew old) . There was an-
other Riley back of the visible one which nobody ever
saw; associates saw the smiling face or the ^'iron
mask/' but no one ever saw "the light behind the brow."
''Away inside of the internal man/' said he, ''is another
man and that man is so superior to the inferior one in
front of him that he shades his eyes with his arm to
hide the blush and shame. The altitude of the superior
man is so great that the inferior can not reach high
enough to touch him."

To RilQr's way of thinking, friendship was as inex-
plicable as poetry. Efforts to explain it were futile.
From Cicero to Emerson it was largely a matter of
speculation. Who could write the history of love? —
and friendship without love was as barren as the coast
of Enderby Land. A passage attributed to Gail Ham-
ilton expressed his view with accuracy sufficient for
quotation. "There is no such thing/' says she^ "as
knowing a man intimately. Every soul is, for the
greater part of its mortal life, isolated from every
other. Whether it dwells in the Garden of Eden or the
Desert of Sahara, it dwells alone. Not only do we
jostle against the street-crowd unknowing and un-
known, but we go out and come in, we lie down and rise
up, with Strangers. Jupiter and Neptune sweep the
heavens not more unfamiliar to us than the worlds that
circle our hearthstone. Day after day, and year after
year, a person moves by our side; he sits at the same
table ; he reads the same books ; he kneels in the same
church. We speak to him ; his soul comes out into the
vestibule to answer us, and retums-^nd the gates are

THE STRANGE YOUNG MAN 251

240 JAMES WIIITCOMB RILEY

dejection. Her daughter, Nellie Millikan, was uni-
formly friendly and helpful. According to the aphor-
ism, ''those who befriend genius when it is struggling
for distinction, befriend the world." Such credit be-
longs to the Millikans. Though the daughter married
and moved to another state, her faith and interest in
Riley never diminished. Her husband, George Cooley,
was equally loyal. "You have a talent," he wrote from
his new home in Illinois, "that is sure to meet with just
reward. Go on, my boy. I only wish it were in my
power to point you to a shorter and easier road to fame
than that you have been compelled to travel. My word
for it, the time will come when it will not be Whit
Riley but James W. Riley, Esquire, one of America's
famous poets."

"Dear James," Mrs. Cooley wrote in the same letter,
"you have no one left in Greenfield who takes the same
interest in you that I did or who is so proud of you
when people write me that you 'are going to the dogs/
How will they feel when the time comes that all who
know you will be so proud to take you by the hand?
The world is before you. You are standing well up on
the ladder. Grip it with a firm hand, be determined to
reach the top. You are young, almost a boy. Take
good care of your health. Do not let the late hours
that bring only an aching head the next day, steal away
your youthful strength and rob you of your brightest
thoughts. Keep them to give to the world. God bless
you."

As Riley grew in years and experience he had a great
deal to say about the well-meant intentions of friends
that were more harmful than helpful. In rhyme he
expressed himself this way:

THE STRANGE YOUNG MAN 241

*^Neglected genius — ^truth be said —
As wild and quick as tinder,
The more you seek to help ahead
The more you seem to hinder/*

His reply to a letter from her was characteristic of
him at that time. As usual he indulged in idle rhymes.

"You want a letter
And I've not a line of prose —
Wouldn't * jingle' answer better?
I have plenty, Gracious knows !
For my mind is running riot
With the music of the Muse."

"Than a rainy afternoon.
And sheds a thinner glimmer
Than the ring around the moon.''

242 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

Life was advancing. The flight of time gave him
scarcely a moment '*to trip it with a rhyme." Never-
theless he really did believe his ''fame was growing
stronger" ;

"And though he fell below it.
He might know as much of mirth.
To live and die a poet
Of unacknowledged worth ;
For Fame is but a vagrant,
Though a loyal one and brave,
And her laurels ne'er so fragrant
As when scattered o'er the grave."

A friend once remarked that 'Hiley is one of
those men who appear to be bom what they are by
some accident of nature." Riley was different. To
begin with, he refused to be bom ''according to
the tradition of the register books." Following a
youthful fancy, he made a little memoir of himself and
changed the year of his birth from 1849 to 1853, adopt-
ing the whim of Henry Fuseli, the eccentric painter,
who changed his birth year from 1741 to 1745. At
first a mere freak, it became in later years a matter of
serious consideration when he grew sensitive on the
question of his age. The freak was a source of confu-
sion to his friends. They wrote for the facts :

"Mr. James W. Riley, the man of great mirth,
Give us the day and the date of your birth ;
We are anxious to know when you came to this earth.
Of the heavenly planets and the zodiac's girtiu"

He dodged the planets, humored his whim and returned
an evasive answer.

He was different. When a boy he refused to be put
through the straight jacket system of education. When-
ever that system gave scope to his individuality

THE STRANGE YOUNG MAN 243

— an too seldom he thought for his advancement — ^he
was its willing votary. But when it addressed him
exactly in the same manner and with the same stand-
ards it addressed other boys, his heart organized an
insurrection. In the Shoe-Shop he was warned of the
danger of reducing education to ''the careless, fitful
spirit of a gamester who felt that he was a part of a
great gaming system." He once remarked of a little
flock of visitors, **I can not endure them ; they are all
alike — all of one order — one habit of thought. I feel
like a wildcat among them.'' **I can remember/' he said
when grown to maturity, "when I, through some
strange hallucination that victimized me for a season,
had a desire to be just like everybody else. I was
afraid somebody would think I was peculiar. I lived
down in a little country village and was ashamed to let
folks know I lived there. I did not fool anybody.
Everybody knew that I was from Greenfield. If I were
a countrjonan and had lived on an eighly-acre farm all
my life and had never been off it, I would brag about
that farm. I would swear it was the most beautiful
piece of property under the light of heaven. If men
doubted it I would tell them to live a lifetime on jiist
such a farm and then they would know."

He was different. At a ''skating bee" on the Missi&-
sinewa River, while the tide of glee slid merrily on, he
sat on the bank, all alone. Skaters came to him with
their zestf ul song :

"0 come with us and we will go
And try the winter's cold, sir ;
Nor fear the ice, nor fear the snow.
For we are tough and bold, sir."

In vain. He preferred the company of his own
thoughts. "Think of it," Bill Nye remarked at a

244 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

later period, ''there he was, just a sliver in the great
wood-pile of creation, yet fancying he heard music
from the breakers far away on tiie restless, rising sea
of ambition."

He was different — ^unfit for the confusion of the
world yet having an intimate knowledge of it. He
knew things by intuition. "Speaking of intuitions," he
said in an interview of his later years, giving a por-
trait of himself, ''I knew a fellow back in my native
town. His name — ^well, he had a law office with a bay-
window on the second floor of a building on Main
Street He was a quiet chap ; he used to have intuitions
and premonitions and all that sort of thing; he had
quite a reputation for them. Time and again when he
saw a stranger crossing the street, he would tell exactly
to what building and to what office he was going, — and
his forecast was usually correct.

''Well, he was sitting in his window one day medi'
tating, like Mark Twain's frog, when he noticed a crowd
of loafers gathering in front of a building across the
way. They began to gaze dreamily up at a man on a
stepladder, who, with his back to them, was swinging
up a shop sign. They all stood there, quiet and silent,
with their hands behind their backs when he remarked
to the men in his office that he could cause a stir among
the dreamers, yet he would not say anything or do
anything other than go over among them for a moment.
Then he put himself under his hat, stuffed his hands in
his pockets, went down-stairs, crossed the street and
lazily slipped in among the gazers. No one moved, no
one noticed him ; every one seemed to be in a trance.
After a minute he began softly to whistle an old famil-
iar hjonn, 'Shall We Gather at the River.* He stopped
at the end of the second line. A man behind him un-

THE STRANGE YOUNG MAN 245

consciously took up the tune and carried it along and
then anotiier caught on, and another, and soon the
whole crowd was whistling softly or half humming the
melody — ^the inoculator in the meantime returning to
his law office. By and by the man with the sign started
to join in unconsciously, but for some reason could not
quite catch the thread of the tune. That took his mind
off his work, and since his work at that moment con-
sisted in balancing the heavy sign on one nail and him-
self on one foot, the result was speedy demoralization.
The sign tumbled down, he narrowly escaped death,
besides damaging the eye of a spectator.''

Here, in a trivial incident of the street, is a glimpse
of Riley's power over the hearts of men. "How did you
do that, James?'' asked his associates in the office.
James did not know. It was a mystery, just as years
afterward his power over an audience was a mystery.
Nevertheless ''the spells of persuasion, the keys of
power" were put into his hands. He was so

"Self -centered, that when he launched the magic word.
It shook or captivated all who heard."

"Robert CoUyer," said an Indiana clergsmian, "can
find abundance of material in Greenfield for his lecture
on 'Blunders of Genius.' " The remark was occasioned
by Riley's declining to quit his "literary den" to attend
a revival. He was different. He stood alone and thus
provoked a sharp criticism from the evangelist, but he
fared no better and no worse, it seems, than young Pro-
fessor Longfellow, whose failure to attend a "pro-
tracted meeting" met with similar disapproval. "I
struck my critic," said Riley, "in the small of the back
with a large chunk of silence. I had my pulpit and
Brother Doe had his."

246 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

It may be said here parenthetically, that quite early
in his career Bil^ readied the conclusion that a man's
greatness did not consist in believing a thing because
it was popular. Ofttimes, as he saw it, it was his duty
to stand for a thing when ''all the cry of voices was on
the other side/' Soon after he reached his majority,
he found a paragraph in Hearth and Home, an editorial
note by Ik Marvel, which served him as a standard of
living almost two score and ten years. ''A man's true
greatness," wrote Marvel, ''lies in the consciousness
of an honest purpose through life, founded on a just
estimate of himself and everything else, on frequent
self-examination, and a steady obedience to the rule
which he knows to be right, without troubling himself
about what others may think or say, or whether they
do or do not do that which he thinks and says and
does."

"Troubled Tom" was such a strange young man. The
more abstruse his lines, the more certainly he charac-
terized himself:

"He would chant of the golden wheat
And then trill a biscuit-song as sweet

As poets ever know.
Then write a rhyme on theme sublimOi
And then twirl his pen as of yore
And write a lay in his wildest way
Of a rival grocery store."

He unraveled wild and wanton fantasies from most
improbable sources. "They were designed," he wrote,

"By cunning of the spider brain —
A tangle-work of tissue, wrought
And woven, in an hour of pain.
To trap the giddy flies of thought"

The image of himself doing strange things In uncom-

THE STRANGE YOUNG MAN 247

mon places was startling. Sometimes he was a
truant schoolboy with a paper kite in the sky, "unwind-
ing syllables of gossamer in glimmering threads of
speech, and leaving at their ends shadowy thoughts
that lost themselves in the fleecy clouds/' Sometimes
he was a cast-away ''unlocking captive lays from the
dungeon of his dismal heart that

Would make the world turn wonderingly around,
And slake its thirsty ear with harmofny/'

Sometimes he was a desolate dwarf on the coast of a
flying island,

"Where only remorse in pent agony lives
To dread the advice that his grandmother gives.''

Such a strange young man. He wanted to idle away
weeks and write in some obscure hotel room, or in the
shade of the Brandywine elms, but such a boon the
Fates denied him. "It was not like Hamlet," he said,
"just a debate in my mind what to do. I literally had
to take up arms against a sea of troubles. I had to
suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune."
The arrows were often nothing more than a confusion
of ideas concerning the properties, but the confusion
was an affliction to him, and it turned out— a plague for
life. His clothes were not cut in the latest slyle.
Women thought he should be at their conmiand.
He should while away the rosy hours in amuse-
ment. He should talk sentiment. Not at all,
thought he. So he set about doing unaccountable
things. He discounted the moon; he forgot to play;
he worked at night and slept in the morning. Un-
willing to countenance his infringements of custom,
his companions soon gave him up as an incorrigible.

248 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

To add to his discomf ort» he lost control of his temper,
when some defiance of his wishes seemed to justify
anger, and frequently (as he discovered on reflection)
when there was no possible justification. ''The extra
lemon/' said his friend, Myron Reed, "that had been
squeezed into the nectar of his disposition damaged
its flavor."

He would pick up slips of paper in stores or offices
to keep in his pocket for lead pencil memoranda. He
made notes while other men worked and thus was fre*
quently pointed out as a lounger. When the dajrs were
long he sought sequestered places in the thickets and
fallen tree-tops, and he once remained hidden away in
the woods in spite of the on-coming rain.

'In those rare odd times, in his better moods
Some rustic verses to him were bom,
That would live, perchance, in their native woods.
As long as the crows that pull the com.''

As the days went by, a lowering shroud of dreams en-
folded him. There were plaints instead of rejoicing,
and "one dismal evening," (he wrote in the gloom)
"when the grimy hand of dusk was wiping out the day
with spongy clouds, he let the fire die out in his room
and refused to light the lamp, declaring that the bur-
den was heavier than he could bear." What, he won-
dered, was to keep his heart warm when friends de-
serted him, when birds declined to sing, when difficulty
seemed a mountain and success a foothill, when he
sat in silence and gazed at the sky through tiie window
"like one who hears it rain"?

"Many men," he remarked half -seriously a decade
after his dismal experience, "live in a community for
years and years, carefully concealing the latent poetry
in their hearts, and pass for reputable citizens ; but it

I'nlnttsl liy miey In IRTa

CffMjJjtes]

Tbe winds came, niitl tlie rain fell:
Tbe gustr jwnic blew —

It iiinitereil not— thp 1.. M. Trws
Bin strong ami stronger giviv

THE STRANGE YOUNG MAN 249

was my fate by an unfortunate current of events very
early in my career to be betrayed and branded as a
poet"

In that period of heart-heaviness lie was seeking
a friendship that would deeply share his joys and sor-
rows. He would compass the miracle of true affection.
He had a surplus of professional friends whose oblique
remonstrations *'were deeper injuries than the down-
right blows of an enemy/' Where was the man who
would lay down his life, if it be necessary, for his
friend? The heroic example of Damon and Pythias
was largely fiction. It should be tnith, he thought, the
common behavior of mankind. He was seeking the
Thousandth Man —

**The Thousandth Man will stand your friend
With the whole round world ag'in you."

"But yesterday one blithe of tongue.
An heir of fortune, fair and young,
Walked with me down the gleaming sands,
And of a sudden caught my hands
And held them, saying 'All mine own !*
And yet alone — alone — ^I walked alone.''

250 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

He was not only a strange young man but he
was a strange middle-aged man and a strange old
man (if it may be said he grew old) • There was an-
other Ril^ back of the visible one which nobody ever
saw; associates saw the smiling face or the ^'iron
mask," but no one ever saw "the light behind the brow/*
''Away inside of the internal man/' said he, "is another
man and that man is so superior to the inferior one in
front of him that he shades his eyes with his arm to
hide the blush and shame. The altitude of the superior
man is so great that the inferior can not reach high
enough to touch him/'

To Riley's way of thinking, friendship was as inex-
plicable as poetry. Efforts to explain it were futile.
From Cicero to Emerson it was largely a matter of
speculation. Who could write the history of love? —
and friendship without love was as barren as the coast
of Enderby Land. A passage attributed to Gail Ham-
ilton expressed his view with accuracy sufficient for
quotation. "There is no such thing," says she, "as
knowing a man intimately. Every soul is, for the
greater part of its mortal life, isolated from every
other. Whether it dwells in the Garden of Eden or the
Desert of Sahara, it dwells alone. Not only do we
jostle against the street-crowd unknowing and un-
known, but we go out and come in, we lie down and rise
up, with Strangers. Jupiter and Neptune sweep the
heavens not more unfamiliar to us than the worlds that
circle our hearthstone. Day after day, and year after
year, a person moves by our side ; he sits at the same
table ; he reads the same books ; he kneels in the same
church. We speak to him ; his soul comes out into the
vestibule to answer us, and retums-^and the gates are

THE STRANGE YOUNG MAN 251

(CHAPTER Xn

IN THE DARK

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, the son of Harvard
and intellectual Cambridge and Boston, could say
with royal grace that no man is bom into the
world whose work is not bom with him; that
there is always work and tools to work withal,
for those who will. But with Whitcomb Riley
it was different. His work was bom with him,
but the tools were not always in sight, and when seen
were often unavailable. Like Robert Bums he had
''materials to discover ; the metal he worked in lay hid
in a wilderness/' where few if any before him ''guessed
its existence. He found himself in deep obscurity,
without instraction, without model." Until his twenty-
seventh year he was ''a man wandering in the dark,''
waging a continual war with Fortune, and groping his
way by the aid of a wandering rather than a fixed
star. His genius was little more than 'the capacity for
receiving discipline."

It always distressed him that vast numbers of people
were unhappy in their occupations. He deplored the
vain endeavor of men and women to be what nature
never intended, "groping, floundering," he once crudely
expressed it, ''going round and round and round, never
getting any sand on the track."

He knew of no reason why men should not "sing at
their work as merrily as a flock of robins in a cherry
tree at sunrise." He was persuaded that each man has

252

IN THE DARK 253

an unquestionable right to an unquestionable place, ''an
aptitude bom with him to do easily some feat impos-
sible to any other. Blessed is the right man in the
right place." Do but the tenth part of what you ca/n do,
said the old ''British Book/' and fame and fortune will
be the result.

**The camel's hump is an ugly hump,
Which well you may see at the Zoo ;
But uglier yet is the hump we get
From having too little to do" —

not having the right thing to do, added Riley so em-
phatically that Kipling most likely would have gladly
made the change.

While riding one day in the "Buckeye" with the
"Standard Remedy" vender, Riley came to a blacksmith
shop, with a smoky sign above the door : Come In And
See Me Work. What he found, on entering the shop,
was truly a revelation — a man unspeakably happy be-
cause he had found his place. Farmers loved to hear
his bellows blow. Pedlers and children laughed and
talked with him as they passed. He was a poet, too.
"The smoke from the forge," said he, "is wild ivy. See
it creep up the walls and cling to the rafters." He
gladly looked the whole country round in the face-
there was so much honesly and fair play in the world.
He was an efficient smithy, but more than that ; he was
a success at the "flaming forge of life." The sparks
that flew from his anvil envied the smiles on his face ;

"His heart was in his work — and the heart
Giveth grace unto every Art."

It is not, thought Riley, musing on his "discovery,''
that a man must be a poet or an orator, or a geologist
in order to be happy. The solution of the problem was

236 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

Usually, they observed, folks were happy when they
were the center of attraction. Not so with Ril^.
During those intervals of absence from home (to
borrow the "corduroy" Unes) :

"And when after a two weeks* vigil he returned,"
said one of his comrades, "he was still the pale, sad-
eyed subject of bewilderment, the problem Fate alone
could decipher. He had dreams that he himself but
half understood and of course none of his friends
understood." He was the man he describes in "Fame,"
who drew

"A gloom about him like a cloak.
And wandered aimlessly. The few
Who spoke of him at all, but spoke
Disparagingly of a mind
The Fates had faultily designed :
Too indolent for modem times —
Too fanciful and full of whims —
For, talking to himself in rh3nnes.
And scrawling never-heard-of hymns.
The idle life to which he clung
Was worthless as the songs he sung!"

The "strange young man" was not always melan-
choly. There were days, sometimes weeks, when he
was a perfect battery of merriment. He was a droll,
ridiculous genius, the gifted, good-for-nothing Bob

THE STRANGE YOUNG MAN 237

he portrays in the "Gflded Roll" — ^laughing always at
everything.

'Ilow sad he seemed in his wild delight,
And how tickled indeed when he wept outright ;
What a comical man when he writhed in pain,
And how grieved he was to be glad again."

On rare occasions when he and his companions were
hilarious in the old-time charades, he

"Went round in a coat of pale pink-blue,
And a snow-white vest of crimson hue.
And trousers purple, and gaiters gray —
All cut, as the French or Dutch would say.
La — macht nichts aris, oder — d4coHet4.'*

Friends declared that he was in almost all respects
the Mr. Clickwad of the "Respectfully Declined Papers
of the Buzz Club," a fictitious series of opinions, ghastly
dreams, impromptu rhymes and literary frivolities,
that he wrote a few years later for the Indianap-
olis Saturday Herald. Often Mr. Clickwad seemed
totally oblivious of his surroundings. He would stare
blankly at the ragged gas-jet, drumming liis pencil
against his teeth. Then he would transfer his attention
to a mangy manuscript, erase a word here and there,
and drop into "a comatose condition of mentality" that,
to lively companions, was aggravating in the extreme.
Mr. Clickwad was calmly accepted as a bundle of con-
tradictions. His faculty for pleasing and horrifying in
the same breath was simply marvelous, the informali-
ties of his fancy ^^ing beyond cavil the most diabolic
and delightful on record."

288 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

With what excess of feeling is shown in a brief
message to Lee 0. Harris. He had "a few moments/'
he said, ''to lavish in a dissipation of thought/' Signing
himself "Troubled Tom/' he sends his Schoolmaster
a postal card to say, ''I have been thinking of you all
day and wondering whether the Muse is on good terms
with you this misty weather. I have had a perfect
nighUma/re of fine frenzy/^ Another time he tried to
express his frenzy in verse :

''0 he was a poet weird and sad,
And life and love betimes went mad ;
He sang such songs as flame and flare
Over the wide world everywhere.
Famous was he for his wan wild eyes,
And his woeful mien and his heaving sighs/'

Though wild and eccentric, though his lips were pale
beneath the lamplight,

"He sang and the lark was hushed and mute,
And the dry-goods clerk forgot his flute ;
And the night operator at the telegraph stand
Smothered his harp in his trembling hand ;
The dull and languid as they read his song.
Sighed all day and the whole night long
For a love like his and the passion warm
As the pulsing heart of the thunder-storm/'

THE STRANGE YOUNG MAN 239

not by dint of any virtue travel the conventional road.
Men of average talent touched life on a few sides only.
The creative spirit was not in them. Hence they re-
garded with suspicion a man of genius who touched life
on many sides. Riley had noted in a '^British Book*'
that men dull in comprehending the eccentricities of a
great painter, set down what surpassed their own
understanding to the account of the painter's stupidity.
The Schoolmaster was of the persuasion that genius
is little in little things. ''The mistake the people
make/' he said, ''is to attribute littleness to genius in
all things.'' Riley complained that the people lacked
impartiality of vision. Everybody in his own degree,
was drugged with his own frenzy. Why deny the
luxury to the poet? It was a matter of gradation. The
poet's frenzy was higher on the scale.

240 JAMES WIIITCOMB RILEY

dejection. Her daughter, Nellie Millikan, was uni-
formly friendly and helpful. Accordins: to the aphor-
ism, ''those who befriend genius when it is struggling
for distinction, befriend the world." Such credit be-
longs to the Millikans. Though the daughter married
and moved to another state, her faith and interest in
Riley never diminished. Her husband, George Cooley,
was equally loyal. "You have a talent,*' he wrote from
his new home in Illinois, ''that is sure to meet with just
reward. Go on, my boy. I only wish it were in my
power to point you to a shorter and easier road to fame
than that you have been compelled to travel. My word
for it, the time will come when it will not be Whit
Riley but James W. Riley, Esquire, one of America's
famous poets.*'

"Dear James," Mrs. Cooley wrote in the same letter,
"you have no one left in Greenfield who takes the same
interest in you that I did or who is so proud of you
when people write me that you 'are going to the dogs/
How will they feel when the time comes that all who
know you will be so proud to take you by the hand?
The world is before you. You are standing well up on
the ladder. Grip it with a firm hand, be determined to
reach the top. You are young, almost a boy. Take
good care of your health. Do not let the late hours
that bring only an aching head the next day, steal away
your youthful strength and rob you of your brightest
thoughts. Keep them to give to the world. God bless
you."

As Riley grew in years and experience he had a great
deal to say about the well-meant intentions of friends
that were more harmful than helpful. In rhyme he
expressed himself this way:

THE STRANGE YOUNG MAN 241

"Neglected genius — ^truth be said —
As wild and quick as tinder,
The more you seek to help ahead
The more you seem to hinder."

His reply to a letter from her was characteristic of
him at that time. As usual he indulged in idle rhymes.

"You want a letter
And I've not a line of prose —
Wouldn't 'jingle' answer better?
I have plenty, Gracious knows!
For my mind is running riot
With the music of the Muse."

"Than a rainy afternoon.
And sheds a thinner glimmer
Than the ring around the moon.''

242 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

Life was advancing. The flight of time gave him
scarcely a moment '*to trip it with a rhjnne." Never-
theless he really did believe his ''fame was growing
stronger" ;

"And though he fell below it,
He might know as much of mirth.
To live and die a poet
Of unacknowledged worth ;
For Fame is but a vagrant,
Though a loyal one and brave,
And her laurels ne'er so fragrant
As when scattered o'er the grave."

A friend once remarked that "Riley is one of
those men who appear to be bom what they are by
some accident of nature." Riley was different. To
begin with, he refused to be bom "according to
the tradition of the register books." Following a
youthful fancy, he made a little memoir of himself and
changed the year of his birth from 1849 to 1853, adopt-
ing the whim of Henry Fuseli, the eccentric painter,
who changed his birth year from 1741 to 1745. At
first a mere freak, it became in later years a matter of
serious consideration when he grew sensitive on the
question of his age. The freak was a source of confu-
sion to his friends. They wrote for the facts :

"Mr. James W. Riley, the man of great mirth.
Give us the day and the date of your birth ;
We are anxious to know when you came to this earth.
Of the heavenly planets and the zodiac's girtii."

He dodged the planets, humored his whim and returned
an evasive answer.

He was different. When a boy he refused to be put
through the straight jacket system of education. When-
ever that system gave scope to his individuality

THE STRANGE YOUNG MAN 243

— an too seldom he thought for his advancement — ^he
was its willing votary. But when it addressed him
exactly in the same manner and with the same stand-
ards it addressed other boys, his heart organized an
insurrection. In the Shoe-Shop he was warned of the
danger of reducing education to ''the careless, fitful
spirit of a gamester who felt that he was a part of a
great gaming system.'' He once remarked of a little
flock of visitors, **I can not endure them ; they are all
alike — all of one order — one habit of thought. I feel
like a wildcat among them.'' "I can remember," he said
when grown to maturity, 'Vhen I, through some
strange hallucination that victimized me for a season,
had a desire to be just like everybody else. I was
afraid somebody would think I was peculiar. I lived
down in a little country village and was ashamed to let
folks know I lived there. I did not fool anybody.
Everybody knew that I was from Greenfield. If I were
a countryman and had lived on an eighty-acre farm all
my life and had never been off it, I would brag about
that farm. I would swear it was the most beautiful
piece of property under the light of heaven. If men
doubted it I would tell them to live a lifetime on jiist
such a farm and then they would know."

He was different. At a ''skating bee" on the Missis-
sinewa River, while the tide of glee slid merrily on, he
sat on the bank, all alone. Skaters came to him with
their zestf ul song :

"0 come with us and we will go
And try the winter's cold, sir ;
Nor fear the ice, nor fear the snow»
For we are tough and bold, sir."

In vain. He preferred the company of his own
thoughts. "Think of it," Bill Nye remarked at a

244 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

later period, "there he was, just a sliver in the great
wood-pile of creation, yet fancying he heard music
from the breakers far away on tiie restless, rising sea
of ambition."

He was different — ^unfit for the confusion of the
world yet having an intimate knowledge of it. He
knew things by intuition. "Speaking of intuitions," he
said in an interview of his later years, giving a por-
trait of himself, "I knew a fellow back in my native
town. His name — ^well, he had a law office wil^ a bay-
window on the second floor of a building on Main
Street. He was a quiet chap ; he used to have intuitions
and premonitions and all that sort of thing; he had
quite a reputation for them. Time and again when he
saw a stranger crossing the street, he would tell exactly
to what building and to what office he was going,^ — and
his forecast was usually correct.

"Well, he was sitting in his window one day medu
toting, like Mark Twain's frog, when he noticed a crowd
of loafers gathering in front of a building across the
way. They began to gaze dreamily up at a man on a
stepladder, who, with his back to them, was swinging
up a shop sign. They all stood there, quiet and silent,
with their hands behind their backs when he remarked
to the men in his office that he could cause a stir among
the dreamers, yet he would not say anything or do
anything other than go over among them for a moment.
Then he put himself under his hal^ stuffed his hands in
his pockets, went down-stairs, crossed the street and
lazily slipped in among the gazers. No one moved, no
one noticed him ; every one seemed to be in a trance.
After a minute he began softly to whistle an old famil-
iar hymn, *Shall We Gather at the River.' He stopped
at the end of the second line. A man behind him un-

THE STRANGE YOUNG MAN 245

"Self-centered, that when he launched the magic word.
It shook or captivated all who heard."

"Robert CoUyer," said an Indiana clergjrman, "can
find abundance of material in Greenfield for his lecture
on 'Blunders of Genius.' " The remark was occasioned
by Riley's declining to quit his "literary den" to attend
a revival. He was different. He stood alone and thus
provoked a sharp criticism from the evangelist, but he
fared no better and no worse, it seems, than young Pro-
fessor Longfellow, whose failure to attend a "pro-
tracted meeting" met with similar disapproval. "I
struck my critic," said Riley, "in the small of the back
with a large chunk of silence. I had my pulpit and
Brother Doe had his."

246 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

It may be said here parenthetically, that quite early
in his career Riley readied the conclusion that a man's
greatness did not consist in believing a thing because
it was popular. Ofttimes, as he saw it, it was his duty
to stand for a thing when ''all the cry of voices was on
the other side/' Soon after he reached his majority,
he found a paragraph in Hearth and Home, an editorial
note by Ik Marvel, which served him as a standard of
living almost two score and ten years. "A man's true
greatness," wrote Marvel, "lies in the consciousness
of an honest purpose through life, founded on a just
estimate of himself and everjrthing else, on frequent
self-examination, and a steady obedience to the rule
which he knows to be right, without troubling himself
about what others may think or say, or whether they
do or do not do that which he thinks and says and
does."

"Troubled Tom" was such a strange young man. The
more abstruse his lines, the more certainly he charac-
terized himself:

"He would chant of the golden wheat
And then trill a biscuit-song as sweet

As poets ever know.
Then write a rhyme on theme sublimei
And then twirl his pen as of yore
And write a lay in his wildest way
Of a rival grocery store."

He unraveled wild and wanton fantasies from most
improbable sources. "They were designed," he wrote,

"By cunning of the spider brain —
A tangle-work of tissue, wrought
And woven, in an hour of pain.
To trap the giddy flies of thought."

The image of himself doing strange things In uncom-

THE STRANGE YOUNG MAN 247

mon places was startlinsr. Sometimes he was a
truant schoolboy with a paper kite in the sky, "unwind-
ing syllables of gossamer in glimmering threads of
speech, and leaving at their ends shadowy thoughts
that lost themselves in the fleecy clouds/' Sometimes
he was a cast-away "unlocking captive lays from the
dungeon of his dismal heart tiiiat

Would make the world turn wonderingly around,
And slake its thirsty ear with harmony/'

Sometimes he was a desolate dwarf on the coast of a
flying island,

"Where only remorse in pent agony liveS
To dread the advice that his grandmother gives/'

Such a strange young man. He wanted to idle away
weeks and write in some obscure hotel room, or in the
shade of the Brandywine elms, but such a boon the
Fates denied him. "It was not like Hamlet,'' he said,
"just a debate in my mind what to do. I literally had
to take up arms against a sea of troubles. I had to
suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune."
The arrows were often nothing more than a confusion
of ideas concerning the properties, but the confusion
was an aflliction to him, and it turned out — a plague for
life. His clothes were not cut in the latest style.
Women thought he should be at their conmiand.
He should while away the rosy hours in amuse-
ment. He should talk sentiment. Not at all,
thought he. So he set about doing unaccountable
things. He discounted the moon; he forgot to play;
he worked at night and slept in the morning. Un-
willing to countenance his infringements of custom,
his companions soon gave him up as an incorrigible.

248 JAMES WHTTCOMB RILEY

To add to his discomfort, he lost control of his temper,
when some defiance of his wishes seemed to justify
anger, and frequently (as he discovered on reflection)
when there was no possible justification. ''The extra
lemon/' said his friend, Myron Reed, ''that had been
squeezed into the nectar of his disposition damaged
its flavor."

He would pick up slips of paper in stores or offices
to keep in his pocket for lead pencil memoranda. He
made notes while other men ivorked and thus was fre-
quently pointed out as a lounger. When the days were
long he sought sequestered places in the thickets and
fallen tree-tops, and he once remained hidden away in
the woods in spite of the on-coming rain.

"In those rare odd times, in his better moods
Some rustic verses to him were bom,
That would live, perchance, in their native woods.
As long as the crows that pull the com."

As the days went by, a lowering shroud of dreams en-
folded him. There were plaints instead of rejoicing,
and "one dismal evening," (he wrote in the gloom)
"when the grimy hand of dusk was wiping out the day
with spongy clouds, he let the fire die out in his room
and refused to light the lamp, declaring that the bur-
den was heavier than he could bear." What, he won-
dered, was to keep his heart warm when friends de-
serted him, when birds declined to sing, when difficulty
seemed a mountain and success a foothill, when he
sat in silence and gazed at the sky through the window
"like one who hears it rain"?

I'lilntcil liy lllley In 1S73

\t:«- YoKK Stork Sign at Asiikbko:

TLe nliiils Ciime. mid the nifn fell;

Tlie Riiaty ptitilc blew —
It iiiiirttTiil not— the L. M. Trees

But strong nnd Btronger grew

THE STRANGE YOUNG MAN 249

was my fate by an unfortunate current of events very
early in my career to be betrayed and branded as a
poet."

In that period of heart-heaviness lie was seeking
a friendship that would deeply share his joys and sor-
rows. He would compass the miracle of true affection.
He had a surplus of professional friends whose oblique
remonstrations "were deeper injuries than the down-
right blows of an enemy.*' Where was the man who
would lay down his life, if it be necessary, for his
friend? The heroic example of Damon and Pythias
was largely fiction. It should be trvih, he thought, the
common behavior of mankind. He was seeking the
Thousandth Man —

'The Thousandth Man will stand your friend
With the whole round world ag'in you."

You can show Mm your feelings. He will bide the
shame of mockery and laughter. He will stick closer
to you than a brother. Riley's hunger for friendship
was the same unsatisfied longing he once attributed to
the heart of a woman:

•'Where art thou. Love, still lost to me
In unknown deeps of destiny?
Thou man of men the fates design
For me ! I reach my hands for thine
Across the darkness, and I moan
My love out all alone — alone.

''But yesterday one blithe of tongue,
An heir of fortune, fair and young.
Walked with me down the gleaming sands.
And of a sudden caught my hands
And held them, sajring 'All mine own I'
And yet alone — alone — ^I walked alone.''

250 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

He was not only a strange young man but he
was a strange middle-aged man and a strange old
man (if it may be said he grew old) . There was an-
other Rilqr back of the visible one which nobody ever
saw; associates saw the smiling face or the ''iron
mask/' but no one ever saw "the light behind the brow."
''Away inside of the internal man/' said he, "is another
man and that man is so superior to the inferior one in
front of him that he shades his eyes with his arm to
hide the blush and shame. The altitude of the superior
man is so great that the inferior can not reach high
enough to touch him."

To Riley's way of thinking, friendship was as inex-
plicable as poetry. Efforts to explain it were futile.
From Cicero to Emerson it was largely a matter of
speculation. Who could write the history of love? —
and friendship without love was as barren as the coast
of Enderby Land. A passage attributed to Gail Ham-
ilton expressed his view with accuracy sufficient for
quotation. "There is no such thing/' says she* "as
knowing a man intimately. Every soul is, for the
greater part of its mortal life, isolated from every
other. Whether it dwells in the Garden of Eden or the
Desert of Sahara, it dwells alone. Not only do we
jostle against the street-crowd unknowing and un-
known, but we go out and come in, we lie down and rise
up, with Strangers. Jupiter and Neptune sweep the
heavens not more unfamiliar to us than the worlds that
circle our hearthstone. Day after day, and year after
year, a person moves by our side; he sits at the same
table ; he reads the same books ; he kneels in the same
church. We speak to him ; his soul comes out into the
vestibule to answer us, and returns — and the gates are

THE STRANGE YOUNG MAN 251

272 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

Why it should call, so unexpectedly, to me, an ob-
scure mortal in a backwoods comer of the world,
is beyond my comprehension/'

"Pleasures and visions," returned Reed, "are come
upon, or they come upon you. Only one man has seen
Niagara Falls, and he was in search of something else
— something prosaic, something that had work in
it; and all of a sudden he heard the steady throb
and pound, and a little later saw the blue and white
wonder."

And what was the vision? Just the plain simple
fact that he was to write poetry. "Jay Whit," the
sign-painter, the Argonaut, was to be the humble in-
strument for the transmission of song to men ; a voice
he was to be for the "inarticulate masses — ^the soiled
and the pure — ^the rich and the poor — ^the loved and
the unloved." Whence the songs? The Argonaut
did not know —

"All hitherward blown
From the misty realm, that belongs
To the vast Unknown.

"The voices pursue him by day,
And haunt him by night,
And he listens, and needs must obey
When the Angel says, 'Write !' "

His fortunate opportunity had come. Not in a mo-
ment, like Hugh Wynne's, but in a fortnight he had
made a decisive resolution, which, once made, con-
trolled him, and permitted no future change of plan.

"Then straightway before
His swimming eyes, all vividly was wrought
A vision that was with him evermore."

Now that he had a definite object, his character and

VISION OF HIS MISSION 273

purpose were to be written broadly on his face. No
waste of time in platitudes; none of the inexpressive
similarity that obscures the men and women who go
in public to see and be seen. He was to be an in-
dividual doing the work Heaven designed him to do,
and in doing it, he was to give expression to truth.
The vision supplied him with the sides of a ladder,
but, as Dickens had told him in the old Shoe-Shop,
the cleats were to be made of stuff to stand wear and
tear, and the Argonaut was to make and nail them on.
His personal reference to the vision was always
virile and stimulating. **I had a dream once years
and years ago," he wrote a friend after he had tamed
the lion of public recognition, "a vision that I should
some day be just what I am this minute, and it made
me a different person.'' He was an impatient wind
from inland regions come suddenly to the seaside, a
wind that had been retarded by tanglewood and
ridges. There was a call from the deep ; the prospect
was divine as his own lines attest:

''And the swelling sea invited me
With a smiling, beckoning hand.
And I spread my wings for a flight as free
As ever a sailor plans,

When his thoughts are wild and his heart beguiled
With a dream of foreign lands."

The dream was the more perfect image of the dream
he had when the musician played — the "fine frenzy"
that entranced him while under the sway of Ole Bull's
magic wand.

Writing the "Golden Girl," he was pleased to
tell her that he had been busily occupied with
literary matters, that he had had (as we have
seen) "a perfect hemorrhage of inspiration.'*

274 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

''Crowdiiij: measures" had gushed like a fountain
from his heart. He had produced poems of better
quality than ever, and had sent ''samples of his fancy
work" to Trowbridge and Longfellow. The vision was
"heaven's own baptismal rite." In the Indiana/polia
Jowmal office in after years, he was wont to cidl it.
My Vision of Summer" :

" 'Twas a marvelous visixm of Summer— <
That morning the dawn was late,
And came like a long dream-ridden guest
Through the gold of the Eastern gate.

"And back from the lands enchanted,
Where my earliest mirth was bom,
The thrill of a laugh was blown to me
Like the blare of an elfin horn."

The tuneful flame had the fervor of the "poetic rage**
that flowed from the heart of Bums when the Scottish
Muse came to the clay cottage to bind the holly round
his brow. It was the gleam that Tennyson saw in the
summer-morn of life.

As Riley said in "The Shower," he was trans-
figured; his empty soul brimmed over; he was
drenched with the love of God. He was also aware
of a happiness in his work hitherto unknown. What
he did was interesting — ^"interesting," said he, "be-
cause I was happy in my thoughts. The more inter-
esting my thoughts, the happier I was."

"A vision may beget some wonder and well it may,"
said Ike Walton, "for most of our world are at present
possessed with an opinion that visions and miracles
are ceased." "They have not ceased," said Riley.
"Again and again I have been guided by an invisible
Destiny. There has almost always come to me a fore-

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VISION OF HIS MISSION 275

cast of events in my life. I once told my brother that
if I put several of my stories and poems together and
gave attention to delivery, I could succeed on the plat-
form. He laughed derisively and for a time that was
the end of that dream. My old schoolmaster, Lee 0.
Harris, used to send poems to the Indianapolis Sentinel
and get beautiful notices. I wondered whether the day
would come when I should contribute to the Journal
and read praise of my work. I like to believe as the
pious men of old that every man has a particular
guardian angel — ^his Daemon — to attend him in all his
dangers, both of body and soul. There have been crises
in my life when I was awed by what I saw. Like
Job— a spirit passed before my face ; my hair stood up ;
fear and trembling came upon me, and made all my
bones to shake.''

The Argonaut had dreams while drifting about with
the "Graphics" — ^not a vision, however; not the clear,
decisive disclosure of what he was to do.

He had a dream when he received a talisman (as he
thought) in the letter from Hearth and Home — ^his
first check for a poem. An air-castle it was with tissue
of riches. He saw himself an Aladdin with the magic
ring on his finger, in a garden, among trees with fruits
of many colors, their foliage beautifully blended with
emeralds, pearls and rubies. In fancy he filled his
pockets with diamonds from the trees and afterward,
by scattering them right and left in handfuls, gained
the affections of the people as the young Aladdin had
done. It was dawn, midday and moonlight — all in one :

"A thousand fairy throngs
Flung at him, from their flashing hands,
The echoes of their songs."

Throughout his "misty years" his mind was a nur-

276 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

Bery for "thick-coming fancies." He pleased his whim-
sical tendency with one from the "British Book." The
gay John Flaxman, fond of merry legends, had invented
for the amusement of his family the story of the Chi-
nese Casket, giving its genealogy, locating the original
in the bowers of Paradise and afterward a reproduc-
tion of it, made of scented wood and precious gems, in
China. There it was protected in a sanctuary by a
princess, who, understanding the language of the birds,
had been taught to prize it by what she heard in the
song of the nightingale. The Casket was to contain the
verse and maxims of poets and philosophers. There
coming a day when the treasure was imsafe in China,
being exposed to the malice of magicians, the princess
carried it to Mount Hermon and deposited it on "a
high and holy hill." There Sadi wrote for the Casket
while a guardian angel watched over it. The poet died
and Hafiz wrote, but when loose visions floated before
his sight and his strains lost their purity and virtue,
indignant angels snatched the Casket away, resolved to
bear it to a distant isle, where virtuous works of art
and virtuous people abound. The angelic keepers
floated with their treasure over inland vales toward the
Golden West. The Muses saluted the flying pageant
as it passed, the Colossus of Rhodes bowed his head and
the gods of Greece clapped their hands. The fleets of
nations waved their pennants in approval and in due
season

"The godlike genius of the British Isle
Received the Casket with benignant smile."

Flaxman's story ended with Britain but Riley and
an early booklover of his native town, whose fancy was
capricious like his own, carried the Casket across the

VISION OF HIS MISSION 277

Atlantic Longfelldw had written his sweetert verse
for it and both thanked Heaven the poet had kept it
free from the taint of corruption and vice. ''My boy/'
said his friend half Hseriously, "the /day will come when
you will write songs for the Casket" The friend (an
intuitive yoimg woman) was not certain that he would
succeed Longfellow but certain she was he would do
what he could, and that what he did would be musical.
'It was the thought of an idle moment," said Riley, ''a
joke taken seriousljr" — seriously, just as one other time
he was capering along the street with some friends,
talking about a wondrous casket he had found and his
purpose to fill it with verse — the friends ttiinking him
in earnest when he was "only joking/'

It may be true that "God hides the germs of every
living thing, that no record holds the moment by the
clock, of any discoverjr"; but surely, if mortal ever
knew he was bom again, ever knew he was face to face
with a turning-point in his career, Whitc<»nb lUley
knew it the summer of 1876. A period in his life had
come when he lived years in a few weeks. Henceforth
his faith seldom failed. Misgivings became less nu-
merous. The vision was

"The fountain light of all his day.
The master light of all his seeing."

"I had come through life," he said, "just dalljring in
the shallow eddies of a brook; now I was a river. I
yearned to float and flow out God-ward. Life was rich-
er than ever I dreamed it could be when I was a trust-
ful child peering out across the future. There is no
rapture like the joy of finding your place and the assur-
ance that you have found it. It is to be transported
from midnight to the rosy light of morning."

278 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

"A srreat ripe radiance grew at last
And burst like a bubble of gold.
Gilding the way that the feet danced on — i
And that was the dawn — ^the Dawn !''

That Riley concealed the particulars of his vision
from his friends has since been thought rather too
diplomatic for one who usually did things in the open«
Whisper it to no one, said the prudent Longfellow-
keep your plans a secret in your own bosom — ^the mo-
ment you uncork them the flavor escapes. Riley pro-
ceeded to act accordingly, not only with reference to
the vision but in other ways. His brother, as we have
seen, ridiculed an early dream and others had treated
his forecasts of a career for himself with similar in-
difference. Such had been his humiliation that he re-
solved to go alone. ''I did not go round soimding a
timbrel in the people's ears," he said, "but clung to my
purpose and kept my own counsel" — and doubtless he
did. Myron Reed seems to have been the first friend to
know of the vision as a revelation. And, characteristic-
ally, he gave the Argonaut another bit of wisdom for
his log-book. "The Cunard Line," said Reed, "has never
lost a passenger. That is not a matter of good luck;
that is a matter of good oak, and good iron, and good
seamanship." Fortunately the Argonaut was provided
with a shield and boom both made of iron — an "iron
mask" and an iron will. The former kept him from the
intrusions of strangers and friends. With the latter
he stuck to his purpose through all kinds of weather,
with all sorts and conditions of men. Through all the
vicissitudes of his literary fortune, his will, like a Rich-
ard Doubledick, was his unsleeping companion — ^"firm
as a rock, and true as the sun." It was not a blustering
will ; rather was it like the steady tug of gravitation.

VISION OF HIS MISSION 279

With that and a little motto from Bleak House-^
"Trust in Providence and Your Own Efforts'* — ^he
went forth to transmute the white momenta of exist-
ence into music for the sons and daughters of men.

He needed the iron will from the beginning. His
friends tempted him with "that object of universal de-
votion, the almighty dollar." Counselors came to per-
suade him that fame (as they thought of his future)
was "the satellite of fashion/' that the applause of the
crowd was worth more than the silent devotion to an
ideal, and his father discouraged his venture in the
new field:

"My son I the quiet road
Which men frequent, where peace and blessings travel,
Follows the river's course, the valley's bending."

A rover, with whom Riley had once toured a few
Indiana towns, was "not making a dollar with
his present show in Pittsburg." He was "waiting for
something to turn up. We are going to take a 'Rip
Van Winkle Compan/ out in three weeks. We will do
the small towns. You can have any part you want
except Rip. Rip is the best drawing bill in America."

The "Golden Girl," a talented musician, who also
had dreams of the stage, sought him for a role in
"The Star of Mystery Company," or rather the frag-
ments of the company. There was to be Mirth —
Music — Magic — and Mystery. "Should I," she
wrote, "secure a position for you with good salary,
will you go? That is my hope of seeing you. Won't
we have FuN? You will carry my grip and go to
breakfast with me and take me to the opera house.
Yes, and waltz with me behind the scenes while the
orchestra plays 'The Blue Danube,' and people go

280 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

wild with expectation waiting for the 'show to begin/
and little boys grow impatient and pummel each
other on the front seats. And we will go down the
street the next day and see the people. You will get
mad at everybody I don't like and I'll like everybody
you do. Life will be enchantment."

Nor did the proffers of advice cease with Riley's
choice of the literary field. He was annoyed with
"overtures from foreign lands/' as he phrased his
temptations, till the publication of his first book. ''The
lecture field is the place for you — and don't you for-
get it/' wrote a literary aspirant three years after his
vision. "Writing is a starvation process. A fellow
is likely to die of inanition. As a friend of mine says»
Tate overtakes him so dem sudden' ; and it makes no
difference how good the writing may be. A writer
must run the gauntlet that looks to the beginner like
the track of the Union Pacific railway stretching in
a straight line clear across the western edge of space,
and all the way up hUU*

The Argonaut was unshaken. None of these things
moved him, nor others of like nature though ever so
numerous and persistent. He gave heart and soul to
his poems, thinking about them and writing them while
painting signs for his daily bread.

There was singleness of purpose in the vision. It
did not trouble Riley with thoughts of being a great
man. Launcelot said it not more humbly than he :

"In me there dwells
No greatness, save it be some far-off touch
Of greatness to know well I am not great,"

Seldom if ever was a young man of genius more
ignorant of his powers. He was not certain that he

VISION OF HIS MISSION 281

possessed genius. That "gift of God" might be his;
time would telL For many years he had doubts of
the value of what he wrote and its reception by the
worldi but never after the virion had he a shadow
of doubt that he was commissioned to sing.

Riley had a vision of his mission, but not a vision
of the obstacles. Whatever situation in life you ever
wish or propose for yourself, said the old poet Shen-
stone, acquire a dear and ludd idea of the inconveni-
ences attending it. Riley acquired no such ludd idea
but plunged at once into a sea of troubles — or rather
some invisible something forced him into it. He did
not count the cost After he had been buffeted on
the sea, and his work was practically done, he saw
that the vision had shown but one side of the picture.
It was significant, he thought, that the Golden Fleece
— ^his fanciful name for poetry — ^had been nailed to a
tree in the grove of the war-god. The lesson was this,
that poetry is an inaccessible thing. ^TThe people think
the way of the singer is the way of peace," he remarked
after he had practically fulfilled his mission. ^TThey
are mistaken. From first to last the poet has to war
against discouragement, nightmares, blockades, and
other perverse conditions." It was another way of his
saying that the poet is a Pilgrim.

''The peculiar thing about us," wrote his friend Reed,
''is our disobedience. We see the light and hear the
voice but heed it not. We are woefully afraid of being
alone with God and the vision of our province." The
advice was timely. Riley had written on the tablet
of his being— obedience to the light, but like all aspir-
ing men, his pure mind was refreshed when stirred
up by way of remembrance. Thus was he launched on
a literary career, looking ever upward and always

282 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

with a true sense of the dignity of his mission, though
at intervals he ''played with jingle" for relaxation
and amusement. True he was to have little rest
and less peace; but he was to ''enjoy the fiery con-
sciousness of his own activity/' The vision was an
abiding comfort. He was twenty-six years old. What
a day of rapture had been his had he been permitted
to part the veil of the f uture, and see on the further
shore of his career, one of his beautiful books, and
read from the author of Pike County BaUads, per-
haps the most cordial letter he ever received — ^"the
finest letter ever penned," was Rile/s word. Long-
fellow wrote him the year of the vision that he had
"the true poetic faculty and insight." Then was the
davm — ^he was beginning to do the thing. When Hay
wrote him, twenty-six years later, he had done it:

Washington, D. C, Nov. 12, 1902.
Dear Mr. Riley—

I thank you most cordially for thinking of me and
sending me your "Book of Joyous Children." I was
alone last night — ^my joyous little people liave grown
up and left me. My fine boy is dead — ^my two girls
are married, my young son is away at school — and so
I read, in solitary enjoyment, these delightful lyrics,
so full of feeling and easy natural music. It is a
great gift you have, and you have not been disobedi-
ent to the heavenly vision. Long may you live to
enjoy it, and share it in your generous way with others.

Yours faithfully,

John Hay.

CHAPTER XIV

THE GOLDEN GIRL

WHITCOMB RILEY dreamed of love and mar-
riage. Not to admit this would be equivalent
to denying the qualities of the true poet. In-
adequately, and sometimes half-seriously, he expressed
his dream in verse: —

"And oh my heart — ^lie down! Keep still!
If ever we meet, as I pray we will;
All ideal things will become fixed facts —
The stars won't wane and the moon won't wax ;
And my soul will sing in a ceaseless glee.
When I find the woman that rhymes with me."

That he never found his mate, that he failed to
find the nuptial rhyme, is now the "fixed fact." That
he strove ardently in his early manhood to find her is
also a fact, although in his bachelor days he was wary
of talk about it and sometimes slow to admit it It
was his fortune to meet many interesting women,
some of them gifted, some divinely fair, but it was
not his fortune to meet "the right woman." And if it
be true, as a certain philosopher has said, that the
best works proceed from unmarried or childless men,
perhaps it was Destiny's design he should not meet her.
When collecting poems for his first book — ^then a man
of three-and-thirty years — ^he reached the conclusion
that celibacy was to be his lot and ever afterward
stoutly affirmed that his fate was inexorably decreed,
sometimes woefully signing himself, "Yours, Fate &

283

284 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

Co." It was tragic, but he realized that, should he
find the "right woman/' she would fail to find in him
the "right man." He "put a washer on his affections,"
as he phrased it, and lodged in his bosom an old saying
from Thales, the answer to the question when genius
should marry: A young gerdtis, not yet; an elder
genius, not at aU.

"I know of nothing," said John Fitch, the
inventor, "so perplexing and vexatious to a man
of feelings as a turbulent wife and steamboat
building. For one man to be teased with both
is to be looked upon as the most unfortunate man
in the world." Riley was aware that the vexation is
the same in poem building, but he was not so ungallant
as to lay all the blame for domestic infelicity at the
door of the wife. As he saw it. Fitch was at fault for
going into partnership with a woman that did not
rhyme with him.

"The highest compliment I can pay to a woman,"
said Riley, at the age of fifty, — answering a wise and
beautiful married woman who was curious to know
why he had not married — "the highest compliment I
can pay to a woman is not to marry her." He pain-
fully realized then, as he did not when a lover, that
he was, by temperament, at least, disqualified for the
obligations of matrimony.

After he had settled down to hard literary work in
Indianapolis, he wrote in a letter to a woman writer:
"The season has been one long carnival of enjoyment.
The city has been thronged with peerless maidens from
all quarters of the globe, and even as I write, a semi-
circle of them lies at my feet *like a rainbow fallen on
the grass,' all wanting me to fly with them and be their
own. But I am an ambitious sort of prince and shall

THE GOLDEN GIRL 285

not fly, having registered a vow to wed only an angel
without fleck or flaw of earthly imperfection and with
a pair of snowy wings 'leven feet from tip to tip/'

If peradventure his thought wandered to marriage,
it was never with the serious consideration of former
years. Like the sailor in 'Tales of the Ocean/' who in
fancy was transported to the side of his Nancy Flan-
ders, he was suddenly disturbed in his dream of
''bridal raptures'' by the gruff call of the captain : "All
hands ahoy !" — and as the sailor took to his ropes, so
the poet took to his pencil.

It should be borne in mind that a poet is human —
so human that he is likely to have many sweethearts.
Like those of other men, his love affairs may be the
subject of humorous or serious comment. Specula-
tions about them may even be beneficial. His tender
passions, his attachments and endearments may seem
sacred, but they should not be wholly outside the pale
of public consideration, since they belong to the world
of joys and sorrows. Wherever literature has lived,
woman has so impressed her beauty and character on
the heart of the poet that all aspects of nature — the
stars and the clouds, the hills and the trees and the
motions of the sea — ^have been to him as mirrors and
heralds of her luster and love. It seems superfluous to
add that she sustains a vital relation to the production
of verse.

In that period of visions and dreams, those intricate
years of the seventies, a new love was a great event for
the Argonaut;

"The world was divided into two parts — ^
Where his sweetheart was, and where she was not."

He would experience a few hours or weeks — seldom

286 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

longer — in dreaming the happy hours away, and then
the Fates would afflict him with the woe of hapless love.
Often a rival would appear. ''Our young friend,
J. W. Riley/' said a county paper local, ''has a poem
on 'The Lost Kiss/ That kiss was lost over in Sugar
Creek township, and we know the young man who
found iV* Often an impassable gulf appeared
between him and his sweetheart which she could no
more cross than he. After several ineffectual efforts
to restore communication he would face the other way
and, as he said, "wander down the corridors of inclem-
ency lonesome as a pale daylight moon —

Ah ! lone as a bard may be !
In search of the woman that rhymes with me.

"In search of what? Of any hand that is no more,
of any hand that never was, of any touch that might
have magically changed his life.'' There is nothing so
embarrassing as to be a lover, — "nothing so harass-
ing," said he. "A terrible thing it is, if the girl is not
in love with you. She will make a football of your
heart and torment you with anguish from Dan to JSeer-
sheba." Man, he perceived, had weighed the sun; he
had determined the path of the stars, and the moment
of an eclipse to the fraction of a second, but he had not
solved the mystery of love ;

"Its passions will rock thee
As the storms rock the ravens on high.''

"I tell you," Riley exclaimed, "there is something
tragically wrong with the married state! Rip Van
Winkle's fate is not fiction. Little wonder he was
driven to drink — and the Catskill woods: / love de
trees — dey keep me from de wind and ratn^— and dey
never blows me up.'*

THE GOLDEN GIRL 287

Writing to a counly paper of a compositor, a printer
friend who had married a Greenfield girl, Riley was
outwardly facetious, but beneath the surface quite seri-
ous about it. "We know little of the bride," he wrote,
"other than that she is fair and womanly beyond all
words ; but as for the compositor — ^we know him and
recall with emotions of awe the way he used to tangle
up our silken sentences and crush and mangle beyond
all hope of recognition the many prattling puns we in-
trusted to his care. The manifold inflictions he heaped
upon us then we bore in mute despair; now we exult,
for he is wedded to another, and our 'schooner* of de-
light f oameth over-^

My dear young friend, regaled with love,.

With all your heart ablaze,

Don't think yourself a lucky dog

For all your married ways ;

But learn to wear a sober face— f

Be hopeful as you can —

'Tis really quite a serious thing

To be a married man/'

There was one sweetheart, the "Golden Girl," who
— since at least a dozen poems cluster round her —
merits more than casual mention. The young woman
who could prompt her lover to write such a masterpiece
as "Fame" is not to be passed lightly by. "Her history,"
to phrase it in Riley's words, "was as strangely sweet
and sad as any you can find in the pages of romance.
Her letters evinced a mind far above the conmion. She
was a womanly woman. I recall her unaffectedness
and simplicity with the tenderest emotions."

She was "a dreamer of dreams," another Mary
Chitwood, giving expression to her aspiring genius
in prose, however, instead of verse, living in

288 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

the woods as 'i;he little singer of Franklin
County'' once lived in seclusion in Indiana. She was
frail — ^the roses in her cheeks were omens of a fatal
malady. She was "one of the beads/' she wrote, "in
that starry circle, that flaming necklace of some kind
strung together somewhere in great black space/' She
was "a soul sea-blown, that knew not of any harbor,
one of those unanchored ships," she wrote again when
trying her fortune in another state, '^hat

'Sail to and fro, and then go down

In unknown seas that none shall know.

Without one ripple of renown/

f »»

With her, into the unknotvn, went her lover's letters,
which — ^to judge from the fragments left— doubtless
contained some of the loveliest prose he ever wrote.
Honey, they were, "dripping from the comb," she
said, "freighted with hope and the brightest bles£h
ings ever dropped carelessly out of Angel fingers upon
this earth ; they are the sparkling gems that adorn and
diadem my life with happiness/'

Riley's dream of the "Golden Girl/' could it be de-
picted in words, would read like some legend of the
tender passion in a Forest of Love. He was another
Orlando, hanging verses on the trees for his Rosalind,
although her temple of the wood was some five hundred
miles away. The trees were books and she was to read
them. And as usual there were not wanting Touch-
stones to mock his effusions, to say that poets are
capricious, that lovers are given to poetry, and so on.
The first word about her came from the lovable Graphic
Chum, James McClanahan. Although he and Riley had
dissolved partnership in sign-painting, they had not dis-
solved their friendship. When on the road, McCIana-

THE GOLDEN GIRL 289

han continued to write of new discoveries. *1 have
found a golden girl/' he said, on one of his return trips
to Indiana, "and I have brought you her beautiful
hand" (taking a tin-type picture of her hand from his
pocket) • "She loves art and poetry ; she writes stories ;
and if she writes you I want you to answer with your
best. She deserves literary friends/' He went on to tell
of her other gifts, how she could play the piano, guitar,
harp and violin. He talked about her beauty — and her
suitors, but did not tell that he was one of Uiem.

McClanahan had first met her at Black River Falls,
Wisconsin, just before her decision to seek health in the
pine region. One day after acquaintance had ripened
into friendship, when genius was the subject of their
talk, he said, "I want you to know a friend of mine in
Greenfield, Indiana, Whitcomb Riley. He is a coming
man in the literary field. I love him better to-day than
any one in the world except my mother. He is my
ideal : he is the whitest man on earth.'' He then read
to her several Riley poems. Such praise did not fall
lightly on the heart of the "Golden Girl."

"How is it you woo ?" asks Riley in a poem : ;

"How is it you woo and you win?
Why, to answer you true — the first thing that you do
Is to simply, my dearest — ^begin.^

So they began, and one result, to say nothing of love,
was a correspondence that was as thought-sparkling as
it was tender and beautiful. The "Golden Girl" was
alone with her mother, young sister, and stepfather in
the Black River pinery. Though ill, she was ambitious.
She had written a story when sixt^n, and the literary
impulse was strong in her. Riley thought of her as a
lonely wild-flower singing and sorrowing with wood-

290 JAMES WHITCOMB EILEY

warblers among the giant trees. He sent her a waif
of his Grub Street days, ''A Poet's Wooing/' to find out
whether she was ''sharper than an eastern wind/' and
whether he was to march frorri her or march to her.
His chief desire was to cheer her in her loneliness.
Other letters were written to that end.

''What can I do to make you glad-^
As glad as glad can be,
Till your clear eyes seem
Like the rays that gleam
And glint through a dew-decked treef '

One letter was "filled with the most cheerful ideas
he could express.'' He drew grotesque pictures with
silly dialogues beneath, representing experiences on the
road with the Graphic Company and "Standard Reme-
dies/' He said "funny things till tears of laughter rose
to her eyelids." She was "prostrated with the sense
of hilarily/' When several letters had passed, he fell
in love— in love with an ideal ; a creature of his imagi-
nation; "an echo of his heart":

''And, like a lily on the river floating.
She shone upon the river of his thoughts/'

Truly, as Riley saw her in his dream, the "Golden
Girl" was — as Longfellow has it — ^"the creature of his
imagination." The woman did not live who could meet
the requirements of that dream. Often he saw her
floating in her birch bark canoe on Black River. The
thought of her quickened his numbers. "It is as easy to
write verse," he wrote, "as for the ripples of the river
to prattle/' He longed to see the light of her smile,

"To peer in her eyes as a diver might
Peer in the sea ere he leaps outright-
Catch his breath, with a glance above,
And drop full-length in tiie depths of love."

THE GOLDEN GIRL 291

It was a versatile correspondence, in which their
hopes and fears, their perceptions, fancies and
witticisms ranged from visions of fortune and
fame down to their weight and age. (She, light as a
leaf, ''possessed the proud dignity of ninety pounds'';
he, one hundred and ten ; she was twenty years old ; he,
twenty-six.) As interest in her deepened, Riley flat-
tered himself that he had found 'that golden fleece, a
woman's love." And he had, but Destiny denied him
the joy of taking it to his own cottage — not the dream
of it, however, which he afterward included in "Ike
Walton's Prayer" — ?

'liet but a little hut be mine
Where at the hearthstone I may hear
The cricket sing
And have the {£ine
Of one glad woman's eyes to make
For my poor sake.
Our simple home a place divine ; —
Just the wee cot — ^the cricket's chirr— i
Love, and the smiling face of her."

"Dame Durden" and "My Littie Woman," he called
her, while she smiled at his pleasantry and returned
with "My King Harold" and "My LitUe Man," lovmgly
twitting him on the poverty of his "Graphic" days:

"Blessings on thee. Little Man, — •
Barefoot Bard with cheek of tani*
Run to Love and Nature's store.
And go barefoot nevermore."

The clever "Little Woman" had deflnite opinions on
good blood and the importance of worthy ancestors.
She was "proud of the rich old southern blood in her
veins — proud that she could trace her forefathers back
hundreds of years and find honor, riches and fame."

292 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

She had the artistic temperament. ''We are kindred
spirits/' she wrote, — ^"said kinship exposed and ex-
plained or money refunded/' She swept cobwebs from
the "Littie Man's" mind:

"Little old woman, and whither so high?—*
To sweep the cobwebs out of the sky/'

She signally influenced Riley in his decision to quit
the law. The law ofSce was the "Growlery/' She
charged him ''to abandon it and nail up the door/' It
was tragic for genius such as he possessed "to be lost
in the mountains of Wiglomeration/' In February,
1876, soon after he had entered his father's office the
second time, she contributed a little sarcasm with her
love. "And you are going to be a lawyer," she wrote,
"and a famous one, too, I'll be bound ! — ^Why, how con-
venient. When I want a divorce you will be my coun-
sel, tell all kinds of stories about my husband's vil-
lainy, pound your fist on a big book, and rumple up your
hair until the jury quails before the breeze of eloquence
which fairly takes them off their feet/'

Riley was in happy valley when he could give the
"Golden Girl" charming names. Reflecting on "the
many hearts she had touched and awakened and the ad-
miration and love she had won," he thought of her as
the lovely Esther Summerson of BleaJc Hovse. "I have
a new name for you," he wrote, "Dame Durden, and I
want you for my sake as well as your own to read the
book/' One passage in it expressed his sentiment as
to what a woman should be : "When a young lady is
as mild as she is game, and is game as she is mild, that
is all I ask, and more than I expect. Then she becomes
a Queen, and that is about what you are."

In the spring of 1876 Riley had suffered from her

THE GOLDEN GIRL 293

long silence. One might explain her silence by citing
her love for McClanahan, provided Riley did not know
of her love. But he did know of it although he was
not aware that she loved his friend deeply. She was
still writing Riley in the spirit of a literary correspond-
ence, and did not then know what she sorrowfully real-
ized a few weeks later, that the Graphic Chum was a
capricious young man, blown hither and thither by baf-
fling winds. Since 1872 he and Riley had been cruising
on a choppy sea. The caprice in each had been about
equally distributed. Riley was soon to find a moorage.
The lovable chum, alas! was never to find one. The
Fates tangled his feet in a skein of ill-fortune and held
them in it to the end. In answer to the letter about her
silence, the girl in the pine woods assured him of her
pride in the possession of his friendship. He was her
"dear old philosopher," to be so patient with her. "It
is a good thing I am a woman," she wrote, "for if I
had to be a man I'd want to be Riley. You belong to
us," — referring to her love for the Graphic Chum. "I
love you next to him, he loves you next to me, and you
love me after him, and we all love each other. Bless
me, what a cobweb! *Amo, Amos, Amat — Amarrvua^
Amatis, Amant/ So you have discovered me in a sea
of fiction. To know that one has been discovered, that
one's dear old friend has formed an opinion at last,
and yet be unable to know what it is, because of not
having read Bleak House. Too bad. Of course I shall
read the book, but my curiosity is aroused ; tell me about
her. I wonder if Dickens affects you as he affects me.
Do his books ever make you feel hungry?

"You are very strange. In your bitter, bitter moods
I understand you and know you best. Ah, don't I know
what they are? How I have fought and fought, bat-

294 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

tling all alone till I knew that they made me older than
the years of time. You can't ima^rine the joy with
which I read your words. Your letters are like a mag-
netic battery. I thank you for the poems. They are
beautiful.''

Writing him at another time, her hands trembled as
she read his words. His earnestness touched her. She
smiled with tears in her ^es to read of the ''Higher
Power than ours discovering us to each other." He
was like a book whose mysteries would not promptly
unravel at her bidding. Little by little she followed the
thread until she grasped his meaning. ''There is a
beautiful song/' she wrote, "'If My Wishes Come
True.' Maybe you know it. Learn it and remember
Dame Durden when you sing it." Then she discovered
to him some of her own moods and confessed to many
errors of her way.

He did not learn the song, but, in part, wrote
one of his own, "When My Dreams Come True" —
or rather, in imagination, made her the author
of it. The "Little Woman" must not be cast down be-
cause of manifold transgressions; she must not sink
beneath any weight of woe. Two lines were written
expressly to lighten her discouragement:

"The blossom in the blackest mold is kindlier to the eye
Than any lily born of pride that looms against the sky."

Commenting on the lines and their origin, at a later
period, Mjrron Reed observed that the nectar of song
is distilled from the dews of sorrow. "Your well fed,
nicely groomed poet," said he, "can not write a song
of the people, by the people, and for the people. There
must have been mud about the roots of a pond lily."

In June (1876) a letter came and she ran to the pine

THE GOLDEN GIRL 295

woods to read it — ''trembling like a girl of sixteen/'
She wanted to be alone to thank God over and over for
her Robin Adair. He had written "The Silent Victors"
in the law office, and by invitation of a committee had
read it at Newcastle on the afternoon of Memorial
Day— I

''What meed of tribute can the poet pay
The Soldiers, but to trail the ivy-vine
Of idle rhyme above their graves to-day?"

In imagination she had seen the dusly twenly miles
he had traveled to Newcastle — ^he had ridden half-way
on horseback and had walked the remainder. And she
had seen the beautiful oak grove in the cemietery where
the exercises were held, where the young poet for the
first time had stepped before the public on a national
holiday. She had heard the band play the sweet varia-
tions of the old Scottish air,

"Had seen his trembling hand-H
Tears in his eyelids stand
To greet his native land — p
Robin Adair/'

"I am so proud of you — ^my hero," she wrote; "you
are worthy the laurels you have won, and more, from
the stingy world. Had I my way the world would be a
flower garden. Fragrant blossoms would pave the
pathway your willing feet would tread to fame. How
I wish I might have been present to witness your suc-
cess ! There would have been one soul of that crowd
whose joy would have reached your own and whispered
the words I could not speak. God has given you gifts
He bestows on few of His children. Your words go
straight to the heart. I am proud and happy in your
love."

296 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

"If I were not so wretchedly impecunious/' Riley
wrote in November, 1876, *'I would come to you in the
disguise of a rich uncle from the golden Americas.''
In the absence of pounds sterling he sent a letter.
Dear old Uncle Sam, with "the precious mite of a three-
cent stamp had made communication of lovers possible."
Referring to a new name he had given her, he said,
"There is something crisp and hearty about it. I feel
your presence with me, and will all winter.

"I sent to Longfellow an imitation of his own slyle
entitled 'In the Dark,' and after the method of what I
consider his finest poem, *The Day is Done.' Are you
familiar with it? If not look it up. When you find it,
study it closely, and then compare my verses with it,
and see if they are not really a clever imitation in lan-
guage, theme, similes, and so forth. I will send you the
poem when it appears ; I know you will like it, for you
were in my mind all the time I was composing it, and
I have no doubt that truant soul of yours was with my
own."

As was the rage in those old days of love, there was
an ample exchange of photographs and tin-types. Like
other poets, Riley sent verse with his portrait, the
"ghost of a face," said he, in "Lines in a Letter En-
closing a Picture." There went with them also many
cheery words for the girl with the hectic bloom on her
cheek :— ^

"I send you the shadowy ghost of a face
To haunt you forever — ^with eyes
That look in your own with the tenderest grace
Affectionate art can devise ;
And had they the power to sparkle and speak
In the spirit of smiles and tears.
The rainbow of love would illumine your cheek
And banish the gloom that appears.

THE GOLDEN GIRL 297

''The lips would unlock with the key of a kiss
And the jewels of speech would confess
A treasure of love that is richer than this
Poor pencil of mine may express ;
O sweeter than bliss were the whispering things
I'd breathe, and your answering sighs
Would hold Cupid on quivering wings
In a pause of exultant surprise/'

In one letter she enclosed the picture of her beauti-
ful hand holding a fan. '1 send you the shadow of my
hand," she wrote ; "it was made on a wager, one day in
1875/' Riley had seen the picture, a tin-type (it will be
remembered) , the previous summer when he and Mc-
Clanahan had raved over its beauty. Interest in it had
not diminished. She had twined a ribbon and a tress of
her brown hair around it. His chum could never say
enough about the beauty of her hair. Prior to receiv-
ing her letter, Riley had written his poem, "Her Beau-
tiful Hands/' He had kept the incident of its origin
a secret; indeed, throughout life it pleased his fancy
to keep it locked in "the round-tower of his heart" It
was the hand of his ideal :

"Marvelous — ^wonderful — beautiful hands !
They can coax roses to bloom in the strands
Of your brown tresses ; and ribbons will twine.
Under mysterious touches of thine
Into such knots as entangle the soul
And fetter the heart under such a control
As only the strength of my love understands —
My passionate love for your beautiful hands/'

The lock of hair was kept among manuscripts in his
trunk. Once afterward when rummaging among by-
gones he chanced to see this "wisp of sunshine," as he
called it. As the girl of the pine woods had married
his adorable chum — ^for .that, after all, was the way it

298 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

happened — ^there came the suggestion for a poem,
"A Tress of Hair":

"Her features — ^keep them fair,
Dear Lord, but let her lips not quite forget
The love they kindled once is gilding yet

This tress of hair/'

A British poet sings of the unsolved riddle of exist-'
ence — why the bird pipes in the woods — ^why the owl
sends down the twilight — ^why the rocks stand still— f
why the clouds fly — ^why the oak groans — ^why the wil-
lows sigh?

**How you are you? Why I am I?
Who will riddle me the hxno and the whyP'

Such is the quandary that rises in the mind when one
reflects on the poet-lover and the "Golden GirL" Why
should their love end in the sad — ^the sweet — ^the
strange No More? At first he suffered from her silence,
then she suffered from his silence, and then their
suffering was mutual. Out of that suffering came sev-
eral poems — ^three that were strangely sad and sadly
sweet— "Say Something to Me''— "An Empty Song"— »
and "Song of Parting."

"The air is full of tender prophecy," she wrote one
Sunday evening. " 'Say Something to Me' went straight
to my heart and found an answering thrill for all the
pleading tenderness of the words your gracious pencil
dropped, though my lips could not speak. I cried when
I read it, as once I cried in the darkness that veiled our
clasped hands and passion-burdened eyes from the
world when you whispered to me, *If I Should Die To-
night.' You remember it — ^the darkness that had grown
compassionate and pitiful, and veiled the whole world

THE GOLDEN GIRL 299

in gloom to give us an hour of happiness more bright
than hour of daylight ever knew, an hour

'In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world
Was lighted/

"I can find no words to tell you of my love, how I
treasure your lightest word, for my stumbling pencil
is devoid of all the subtle power that hangs about your
own. I can not trace the thoughts that wake into newer
life at your touch, and set my happy answering heart
aglow, for before my stupid fingers have well begun
their tasky other and yet other thoughts have over-
thrown the kingdom of the first and left me but the
sturdy words, I Love You. Tell me — ^My Prophet — ^is
that future surely coming to us, whose brilliancy fell
in a golden glory that covered up all the gloom on that
'day of pure gold' of which you write? — •

'Something in our eyes made tears to glisten ;
But they were not sad/ "

Then followed "An Empty Song/' As signified in
the poem, she was the sun of his heart but she could
not shine on both sides of it. He might have said as
he did say in another poem that

"She was the dazzling Shine— I, the dark Shade—
And we did mingle like to these, and thus.

Together, made
The perfect summer, pure and glorious/

But there was a shadow of the heart, "issue of its
own substance," he phrased it, which she could not
lighten. Her radiance, all-powerful in beauty and love,
could not scatter the night of the soul.
And then the "Song of Parting." The full signifi-

800 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

cance of the poem is seen in the fact that it was, in
spirit, a joint production ; the lover speaks in the first
and second stanzas, the "Badger Girl/' as he sometimes
called his sweetheart, in the last. In the original there
are such lines

"Do not weep — ^f or tears are vain-
Ldttle mists of foolish rain.

''Say f^ewell, and let me
Since the Fates have planned
That your love can only grow
In a richer land/'

Before we say farewell, the ''Badger Girl" shall have
a few words more. She shall tell a little more clearly,
though painfully, her own story. We have her lover's
story in his poems. Referring to the shadow on his
heart, and to the poems of that period, Riley said, "I
wrote with my heart's own blood/' He was not alone
in his despair. She, too, wrote with her heart's own
blood. Surely she knew herself better than her lover
or any one else knew her.

At their first meeting there were of course revela^
tions for each, which ihe poor power of letters had
failed to impart. Riley deftly concealed his sadness at
the thought of her declining health. "She was fragile
as a lily," he said, "delicate as a snowdrop." But there
were other considerations besides health.

"Each had another life they longed to meet
Without which life, their own were incomplete."

The meeting did not reveal that other life. Whether
it would have been revealed had her health been re-
stored is mere conjecture. There was hope of her
recovery, but it was hope with a shadow. One thing

THE GOLDEN GIRL 301

is clear, if we accept the testimony of each, their meet-
ing did not diminish their love. They talked of the
paths into which their feet had strayed, how they had
walked on and on, dreaming, hoping that ''one little
comer of the curtain that hid the future from their
eyes would lift and discover to each the life he longed
to live. God's mysterious hand had led them and was
still to lead them on/'

Henceforth their letters were candid to a degree that
excites sjrmpathy. "Will you understand me I won-
der," the lover wrote some few weeks later, "if I tell
you that I fear I am going to make you unhappy? Will
you understand me when I tell you that, should the
premonition prove true, your unhappiness would be
my own? I fear you never will understand just what
a strange paradox I am. I hardly know mjrself. But
you must not think too kindly of me. Not that I do
not deserve love, but rather because all the affection I
can offer in return is as vain as it is wild and fervid.
If I could take your hand and hold it as I say these
words, you would know how deeply sad and earnest
and most truthful I am in this belief. My life has been
made up of disappointments and despairs. This is no
fancy with me. It is bitter, bitter truth. I have
learned to bear it well. I have learned to expect but
little else. I ache, but I grope on smiling in the dark.
You are not strong as I am strong. Your tears would
overflow your path and sweep you back. And you must
not know what I endure. God made you to be glad;
so you must not lean too far out of the sunshine to
help me. I am not wholly selfish as I struggle down
here in the gloom, but I am tired and so worn I can
but grasp your hand if proffered — only don't— don't.
Just hail me from the brink with cheery words. That

302 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

will be best for you — and as for me — why, I will be
stronger knowing I have dragged no bright hopes
down with my poor drowning ones. My whole being
goes out from me, and I am calling to you through the
great distance that divides us. Do you hear? God
bless you, little girl, and keep you always glad as you
are good. You must write me at once. I dream now
that your face is drooped a little, and I lift it with my
hand, and it is bright and beautiful. So, set it heaven-
ward and where the sunlight falls, and I will see its
glancing smiles flash back, and that will help me more
than words will say."

"There is an ache in your heart," Riley wrote again,
"which can never be conquered or tamed down. Like a
prisoned bird, it beats its wings against the bars a^d
makes your life a discord." He had discord in his own
life ; to wed that to more discord meant disaster that
was not all personal. He would shield his sweetheart
from such a destiny. He could say with the hapless
Poe, "Toward you there is no room in my soul for any
other sentiment than devotion. It is fate only which I
accuse. It is my own unhappy nature."

"0, how right you are," she answered ; "I shiver with
the jarring sense of discord as I write. I have so many
faults, so much pride ; yet I must be earnest with you ;
I must say all — ^if you hate me for it.

I am digging my warm heart
Till I And its coldest part ;
I am digging wide and low.
Farther than a spade can go.

I am different, so different from your ideal, your Tearl
of Pearls.' One day I am satisfied with all the world
and want to take it to my arms and caress it — ^the next.

THE GOLDEN GIRL 303

I feel sure it is full of injustice and misery underneath
its smiling exterior, and I descend into my ice-house of
rebellion. Then I listen to 'soft nothings' with radiant
face and sparkling eyes, smile into faces that smile
down into my own, do a happy careless laugh to perfec-
tion, when flat things are said in the way of compliment
that smack of having been committed to memory in
some long ago when some one fairer than I had in-
spired their utterance; and then a miserable conceit
takes hold of me like death and I say to myself, 'I am
in shallow water and must wade because these people
know no deeper soundings' — and I pity them, I who so
much need forbearance myself."

"I seem not to make you understand me," she writes
at another time. "My life is empty and purposeless or
has been — and yet underneath it all there pulses a
great, strotig, unconquerable passion for something
higher and better, something that your words make me
dare hope is almost within my reach. A sense there is
of being cramped into a narrower space of thought and
action than God intended. A numbness, too, and un-
consciousness and inability to use with intrepidity the
few gifts I might have had ; but they have so long lain
dormant that they are useless and withered as a limb
long bandaged from the air and sunshine. I dread to
be misunderstood. I have a horror of miscellaneous
pity. But you seem to understand me better than the
rest; you encourage me to think that this element of
— well, I can not name it — this inside kernel, this
knaggy knarl would have made me infinitely more
worthy of you had I been rightly, properly kneaded in
the first place, for I believe I was put together like a
Chinese puzzle and am at present wrong-side-out or up-

304 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

side-down or t'other-side-to and need but some skillful
hand that understands the machinery to put me rifirht.
I think there is a secret spring, if one could only find
it, that if suddenly touched would immediately set me
straight, like a stove-pipe hat, — ^the theatre hat, made
of springs, don't you know. You know what I mean —
you have seen them.

**I know you would not give me hope and aspirations
if you imagined they would come to naught. I can but
fresh courage take from your words and honest convic-
tions. Do not wonder that my hand trembles as I
write, that my heart bounds again with joy — a great
joy that you think me capable of something better than
the poor fluttering moth that I seem to be.''

It is noteworthy that the Little Woman first reached
the conviction that they could never marry. Usually
insight and foresight are attributed to man. He is wis-
dom. Woman is love. But love is wisdom also when
lodged in the heart of a Dame Durden. By combining
wisdom and love, Dickens made her one of the ador-
able women of fiction — and it was lovingly complimen-
tary in Riley to give his sweetheart the name :

**My Little Woman, of you I sing
With a fervor all divine."

It was said at the beginning of the chapter, that
Riley was in love with an ideal. It may now be said
that there was an uncommon measure of the ideal in
the "Golden Girl," and that her infiuence like an angelic
presence remained with the poet through the "ten pro-
lific years" that succeeded their correspondence — ^the
decade that saw the light dawn on his best work.

"Do you suppose I would spoil my ideal by getting
married?" The remark is attributed to Frances Wil-

Heb Beautiful Hand
From 11 tintfpe taken when tbe Golden Girl was nineteen.
liiBIJinitlon for the poem; "Her Beautiful Hands"

THE GOLDEN GIRL 805

lard. Whatever may be said of its authenticity, the
thought was certainly not far from the heart of the
"Golden Girl" when she penned to Riley the following :

"My Dear Friend, the dearest friend I have on earth,
believe me when I tell you your letter has touched me
deeper than I have words to express. I am stretching
my hands out to you. Take them, crush them till the
pain deadens the terrible anguish and pain at my heart
I am coming to you one moment —

*One moment that I may forget
The trials waiting for me yet.'

There is a great, yawning dark gulf between us — a
hopeless one. You know not, you can not, dare to guess
it nor can I tell you more now. We are like children
groping in the dark. It is as impossible to bridge the
gulf or in any way lessen the distance, as it is for me
to stifle the moan that rises to my lips when I think of
it. That gulf can never be crossed. Mine is the fault,
mine alone. I cross to this side, but you can not
follow.''

"A brave soul is a thing all things serve," she quotes
in another letter and then goes on to marvel at a strange
world, hardly knowing what to make of it, or herself,
or her lover, or any one. God had some special work
for her when He created her, but finding some other
hands perhaps more willing, He left her with a half-
awakened consciousness of what she had lost — no object
in life to bid her clamber up the long hill whose rugged
steeps then echoed with the footsteps of her lover, for
"you," to use her own words, "are slowly, surely making
your way with noble energy to the top of the mountain.
As you pass me on the path that glitters with the reflex
of tears rained from many weary eyes that weep no
more forever, you recognize the task before you as you
never did before, perhaps, and pity me as I sit silent^

806 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

discouraged, mastered by the first obstacle at the foot
of the hiU/'

Fragile — aimless and hopeless as she thought, per-
haps after all her influence would follow him. What
could he do, she once asked, without the heart of
woman ? Her answer to her own question was signifi-
cant.

"What could he do indeed ? A weak, white girl
Held all his heartstrings in her small white hands ;
His hopes, and power, and majesty were hers.
And not his own."

Feeling thus, a new thought was bom in her heart — a
thought that God had meant one day to create her and
her lover for each other. "To you," she wrote, "God
gave a noble manhood, genius to love and appreciate
His holy handiwork, and having well in mind the
woman He should send you by and by to make your
earth a heaven. He gave you a heart as gentle and
kindly as ever allotted to earth's creatures, and set you
pure and stainless to await my coming.

"Alas! some envious hand sullied the brightness of
the picture and in punishment God sent me unfinished,
far away from you into the maelstrom of the world, and
left me groping blindly, longing for the treasure I had
lost yet never known. And a dreary sense of the same
bitter loss makes you long for 'the one woman on earth'
— ^makes you grieve for the incompleteness of her who
should have been your ideal, the imperfection of the
gem that you hoped to find perfect. God sent us apart
and has kept us apart. Will we ever meet? I am sorry
for you, sorry for myself. I can love you — love you as
no mortal yet has loved you when I remember all I
might have been for your sake — ^love you with a passion

THE GOLDEN GIRL 807

God has no time to tone down." With this she asks of
her lover in a closing paragraph, if he had read the
Two Destinies, and then signs herself, "Yours always/'

In a brief note a few days later, she fears the clouds
she and her lover thought would drop in dew might
scatter snow. She wished him to know with what a
masterly hand he had kindled her "into fire: — ^heap of
ashes that she was — a fire, however, inseparable in its
nature from herself, quickening nothing, lighting noth-
ing, doing no service, idly burning away."

"A sad story," her friends were heard to say, and
doubtless others who read it for the first time will say
the same. But let them not rue it as an exceptional
fate. True love leads over a rough and thorny way.

Who believes that the influence of this gifted being
ended with death? — she who "could lay her fevered
cheek against the weeping window pane, close her eyes,
and hear in the dripping rain the tread of trembling
fairy feet on the roof?" — she

"Who felt sometimes the wish across the mind
Rush like a rocket tearing up the skies?"

Dear Little Woman ! the fire of your love is still burning
— but not idly burning. Your lover jeweled songs with
your tears. The clouds did after all drop dew.

"From his flying quill there dripped
Such music on his manuscript
That they who listen to his words
May close their eyes and dream the birds
Are twittering on every hand
A language they can understand."

By smiting upon the chords of the poet's heart with
might, the Little Woman contributed to literature the
immortal "Fame," according to his father, the greatest

308 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

poem the son ever wrote. Alas, for the Little Woman!
it did not augur fame for her.

If the reader desires to know how the "Golden GirPs*'
courtship ended historically, he will find it in a closing
chapter of Bleak House, with a little shade to color it
from Enoch Arden. After a grievous misunderstand-
ing, McClanahan, her former love, "the wreckless, lov-
able boy with the good heart and extravagant ideas/'
returned and made amends for his absence and seem-
ing neglect. Unlike the Tennysonian narrative, she
had not married in the meantime, although she had
been ardently loved by Riley. True to what befell in
Bleak House, Riley assumed the role of the Guardian,
restored his friend to the old place in her love, and
consented to their wedding, "soothingly, Mke the gentle
rustling of the leaves; genially, like the ripening
weather; radiantly and beneficently, like the sun-
shine." So they were wed.

"And merrily rang the bells.
And merrily ran the years,"

two transient, happy years, a steady decline in the
bride's health — and then a grave.

There was truly a song in the parting. All that the
future could bestow was welcome now. That Riley
worshiped the fair hand seemed for a moment a mis-
take— and thus the poem "Say Farewell and Let Me
Go." But it was not a life-long good-by. There
was but one remove from her to the Muse of
Poesy. Indeed, as the years came with their opulence
of joy and sorrow, the memory of her became a sacred
presence. When he and his friend McClanahan talked
of her, there was pathos in his voice that others never
heard and few, had they heard, could understand. The
memory of her kept him from "a selfish grave." It was

THE GOLDEN GIRL 309

"The one bright thing to save
His youthful life in the wilds of Time/'

The distance between her and the Muse of Song was so
slight that he often — ^more seriously than his friends
suspected — referred to his favorite goddess as the
Little Woman, styling himself the Little Man beside
her in his bark, on their poetic way. The fates had
woven her into the warp and woof of his destiny. She
was the "golden-haired, seraphic child,'' whose flying
form was ever plying between his "little boat" and the
driving clouds. His o^ii version of the Muse seems a
dancing phantom. Nevertheless, she was the Queen
of "the rosebud garden of girls." She was the "beau-
tiful immortal figure," she was the "Empress of his
listening Soul,"

"The Parian phantomette, with head atip
And twinkling fingers dusting down the dews"

that glittered on the leaves of simple things, — he, the
wooing Jucklet standing knee-deep in the grass, waiting
for the fragrant shower.

Thinking to disarm the critics, Riley called his por-
trait of the Muse a monstrosity of rhjrme, but time has
long since relieved it of that imputation. "The phantom
left me at sea," said he a score of years after he had
come under the mesmeric spell. "After I had written
the lines they worried me a great deal. I did not fully
comprehend them then, nor do I now." In "An Adjust-
able Lunatic" where the lines appear, he says his "mind
was steeped in dreamy languor, and yet peopled with a
thousand shadowy fancies that came from chaotic
hiding-places and mingled in a revelry of such riotous
extravagance it seemed a holiday of phantom thought."
The music of the Muse rippled mystically from her
harp. It was the despair of mortals —

310 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

• • . • ''the pulse of invoiced melodies

Timing the raptured sense to some refrain

That knows nor words, nor rh3rmes, nor euphonies.

It belonged to that higher region of poetry of which
Longfellow talked when Riley called to see him at the
Craigie Mansion. 'It is too delicate/' said Longfel-
low, "for the emotions and aspirations of the human
heart — ^too fragile for the touch of analysis. The
thought like the exquisite odor of a flower, losing all
palpable embodiment, is veiled and often lost in the
mist of its own spiritual loveliness.*'

It was just this impalpable something that Riley saw
as in a trance or dream but could not express. Some-
where, with unseen wings brushing past him, a lawn
bespangled with flowers unrolled beneath his feet. On
his ear fell a storm of gusty music,

"And when at last it lulled and died,
I stood aghast and terrified.
I shuddered and shut my eyes,
And still could see and feel aware
Some mystic presence waited there ;
And staring with a dazed surprise,
I saw a creature so divine
That never subtle thought of mine
May reproduce to inner sight
So fair a vision of delight.

"A syllable of dew that drips
From out a lily's laughing lips
Could not be sweeter than the word
I listened to, yet never heard. —
For, oh, the woman hiding there
Within the shadows of her hair.
Spake to me in an undertone
So delicate, my soul alone
But understood it as a moan
Of some weak melody of wind
A heavenward breeze had left behind."

THE GOLDEN GIRL 311

There was a tracery of trees in the sky near the horizon
toward which the dreamer gazed, a background of
dusky verdure for the vision of womanly loveliness that
stood beautiful and statuesque before it. She loomed
there in the twilight as if the spirit-hand of Angelo
had chiseled her to life complete : —

"And I grew jealous of the dusk.
To see it softly touch her face,
As lov^-like with fond embrace
It folded round her like a husk:
But when the glitter of her hand.
Like wasted glory beckoned me,
My eyes grew blurred and dull and dim—
My vision failed — I could not see— •
I could not stir — I could not stand.
Till quivering in every limb,
I flung me prone, as though to swim
The tide of grass whose waves of green
Went rolling ocean-wide between
My helpless shipwrecked heart and her
Who claimed me for a worshiper/'

CHAPTER Xy

Dght and counsel from the wise

A STOUT champion of scientific thought^ whose
habit was to deal with the elemental truth
of things, adorns English literature with a
memorable picture of the game of human life — ^the
game which has been played for untold ages, every
man and woman of us being one of the two players
in a game of his or her own. "The world is a chess-
board/' he says ; "the pieces are the phenomena of the
universe, the rules of the game are what we call the
laws of Nature. The player on the other side — a calm
strong angel who is playing with us for love as we say
—is hidden from us. We know that his play is always
fair, just and patient. But also we know to our cost that
he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest
allowance for ignorance. To the man who plays well,
the highest stakes are paid, with that sort of overflow-
ing generosity with which the strong delight in
strength. And the one who plays ill is checkmated —
without haste, but without remorse."

An inspiring conception, provided one sees it as
Riley saw it — a thing divine. Without that, clouds and
mountains, the stars spinning through space were but
vanishing dust and vapor. Back of physical splendor
and terror, below, within and above the law of Nature,
this side and beyond the Calm Angel, the poet saw
the sublime miracle of the Infinite All-in-AU, of which
the chessboard of the world is the manifestation.

312 •

LIGHT AND COUNSEL FROM THE WISE 313

Education is learning the rules of this mighty game
— ^man in loving communication with Nature and the
God of Nature : "the study of men and their ways — ^the
fashioning of the affections and of the will," that he
may live in harmony with universal laws. Not an easy
task, not now idly dreaming in an empty day. Riley
has had the vision of his mission: he has chosen a
passenger for his "little boat," the lively Muse of
Song. How will he play the mighty game? Some
have said he played it foolishly, but they say this in
ignorance of the facts.

"As in a game ov cards,'' his friend Josh Billings
once remarked, "so in the game ov life, we must play
what iz dealt tew us; and the glory konsists not so
much in winning as in playing a poor hand well." A
college training and superior opportunities of culture
were not dealt to the Poet of the People. Sometimes
he whined over his lot ; sometimes he talked back. Nev-
ertheless he became human and lovable^ He played
a poor hand well.

Among the first things he did after his vision was to
seek light and counsel from eminent litterateurs — and
it took courage to do it. Distinguished authors in their
books had been profitable company, but to approach
them directly concerning himself was different. Never
then, and seldom, if ever, in his maturer years, did he
"run the risk of becoming proud of his powers and
abilities." He was modest. His timidity was painful.
To write about genius was to assume that he had
genius, and of this he was not at all certain. Nor was
he certain any one could tell him. At the last it was —
"Trust in Providence and his own efforts."

Then, too, it was perhaps a burden on older authors
which young writers should not inflict. It is one of the

314 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

penalties of eminence, Reynolds had said, to be obliged,
as a matter of courtesy, to give opinions upon the at-
tempts of the dull. Mark Twain would not do it. "No,"
he wrote in the old "Galaxy" magazine, where Riley
first learned to love him, "no, I will not venture any
opinion whatever as to the literary merit of a young
writer's productions. The public is the only critic
whose judgment is worth anjrthing at all. If I honestly
and conscientiously praise his manuscript, I might thus
help to inflict a lingering and pitiless bore upon the
public ; if I honestly and conscientiously condenm it, I
might thus rob the world of an undeveloped Dickens or
Shakespeare."

Writing the eminent for encouragement was the rage
among aspiring Hoosiers in the seventies. There was
an occasional skeptic, who considered it a sleeveless
errand — ^"whistling jigs to a mile-stone" — ^but the cur-
rent sentiment favored it. Aldrich, when a young
man, had received a letter from Hawthorne warmly
praising his early poems, and had kept "the pearl of
great price" among his autographic treasures to the
end of his days. Mark Twain had been warmly com-
plimented on his first book, in a letter from Oliver
Wendell Holmes. Henry George had a letter from John
Stuart Mill, which sent him to his study and to fame.
Longfellow had been signally helped at the age of
eighteen. Jared Sparks had shown him that "his style
was too ambitious; his thoughts and reflections were
good, but wanted maturity and betrayed a young
writer."

Among the first of the "rising Hoosiers" to receive
one of the coveted letters was the Schoolmaster, Lee 0.
Harris. His friends encouraged him. That man was
a poet, they thought, who —

LIGHT AND COUNSEL FROM THE WISE 315

''saw the Mom arise

Like Venus from a sea of mist.
And blushes redden all the skies
When Night and Morning kissed. ''

Authors were certain to take notice of such verse.
Whittier wrote of the "rhjrthmical sweetness*' in the
teacher's poems. Trowbridge thought "they showed a
sufficient mastery of language to warrant obedience to
any literary impulse." Longfellow liked ''Sunset Be-
hind the Clouds" and suggested a few changes with
the hope that the yOung pedagogue would not think him
hypercritical: "the real merit of the poem made him
speak frankly."

Maurice Thompson, more ambitious than the rest,
sought counsel in foreign lands, and received the fol-
lowing from Victor Hugo: "Young man, hold your
head right! The stars are not really in clear water.
Those are shams. Look up always as you do now.
Labor Limae — sic itvr ad astra. (Labor to the end :
such is the way to immortaUty.) I reach across the
ocean to you. I hope the young men coming after me
will do strongly what I have feebly begun."

After a restless period of hesitation and deliberation,
Riley wrought his courage up to the sticking point.
That done, the rest was easy. First of all, he would
write his patron saint — ^Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
And that was to be expected. "When a boy," he said,
"I giggled on hearing the name 'Longfellow* but it soon
became positively poetical and musical to me." When
quite a young man he considered it "a liberal education
for a poet just to read Longfellow." At the poet's
grave he said, "The touch of his hand was a prayer and
his speech a blessed psalm." As early as 1868, at yoimg

316 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

Riley's suggestion, the Greenfield Commercial, an ob-
scure county paper, followed the poet on his tour
through Europe, there appearing as late as October
such locals as, 'Tiongfellow at last accounts was doing
the Paris picture galleries/'

Prior to writing Longfellow, Riley had had the let-
ter from Donald G. Mitchell about a ''very graceful
poem,'' with the accompanying hope that he would
''not be discouraged from further exercise of his liter-
ary talent." This was followed with one from the
Danbury News: "Let me say," wrote the editor, "that
you are a good writer and a promising one, and bye
and bye, if you keep on improving as you have, you
will acquire what is everything to the scribe — ^fame;
and this secured your writing will command remunera-
tion of your own figuring. At the moment it is up-hill
work. Perseverance is your best ammunition. More
wounded than killed in the great battle of pen-and-
ink."

One "dapperling of comfort" from Lee 0. Harris,
Riley remembered in love long after the applause of the
world had become uninteresting. "Dear old friend,"
wrote the Schoolmaster in October, 1876, "and fellow
convict on the chain gang of phantasy. I have taken
upon myself the task of trying to find a publisher."
(Collaborating with B. S. Parker, the literary
fledglings were feebly attempting something in book
form. All three "confessed to two of the oddest infirm-
ities in the world" : one, that they had no idea of
time ; the other, that they had no idea of money.) "Un-
less we do find a publisher," Harris continues, "I do
not see what we can do. Parker has no money and I
expect you have about half as much as he has and I
have less than both of you. Your 'August* is good ;

LIGHT AND COUNSEL FROM THE WISE 317

The forest stands in silence, drinking deep
Its purple wine of shade/

rvas written by a true poet/'

Other testimonials have passed into oblivion, but
that one stands the test of time. When recalling it,
Riley was once reminded of what Emma Abbott said
to her friend Reed. The young singer had been
stranded on the road and Reed had paid her fare to the
next town. "Myron Reed," she said, calling at his
home in the noontide of her fame, "I have come to
thank you for the ten dollars you loaned me. Ten
dollars, when one must have it, is worth more than one
hundred thousand dollars when one does not need it."
So Riley thought of the little postscript of praise from
the Schoolmaster.

Having written two letters to eminent authors, Riley
was suddenly confronted with the loss of their ad-
dresses. It was the dawning of his lifelong distress
over his inability to find things he had so carefully put
away — "A place for everything," he would repeat when
hopelessly seeking letters in his desk, "a place for
everything and everything some place else/*

"I should be handled by the Grand Jury," said he,
"for not knowing the address of Longfellow." But he
did not know it; hence the following to the School-
master, who was then teaching in Lewisville, Indiana :

Greenfield, November 20, 1876.
Dear Harris —

I intended to take down the addresses of those two
celebrities while you were here. Will you furnish them,
please, by mail and any others you may know of?

I have my letters "calked and primed" and only await
your kindness. Yours,

J.W.R.

318 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

The addresses (answered his Schoolmaster) are,
Henry W. Longfellow, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and
John T. Trowbridge, Arlington, Massachusetts.

Having addressed the envelopes, Riley hastened to
the post-office. "I approached the letter box with
trembling," said he, — "held my letter in my hand, hesi-
tating and turning it over, wondering whether I had
omitted something or had written something I should
not write. I had enclosed three poems, 'In the Dark,'
*A Destiny* (now entitled *A Dreamer*), and *If I
Knew What Poets Know.' Should I have enclosed
others, or were they my best ? I did not know." The
letter he dropped in the box was as follows :

Greenfield, Indiana, November 20, 1876.
Mr. Henry W. Longfellow —

Dear Sir: I find the courage to address you as I
would a friend since by your works you have proven
yourself a friend to the world. I would not, however,
intrude upon you now did I not feel that you alone could
assist me.

For a few weeks I have been gaining some praise
for poems written with no higher ambition than to
please myself and friends ; but as many of them have
been copied through the country and the fascination of
writing has grown upon me, I would like to enter the
literary field in earnest, were I assured I possessed real
talent. I have sometimes thought so, and again have
been very doubtful in that regard. About two years
since I sent a poem to Hearth and Home, and it was
received and published with illustrations. I had given
them the poem, but they paid me for it, a small though
handsome sum to me, and I was encouraged to send
another, which I did, but the journal was just suspend-
ing as it reached them. My manuscript was returned,
with a kindly note from Donald G. Mitchell, the retiring
editor, advising me to continue the exercise of what he
was pleased to term "my literary talent"

LIGHT AND COUNSEL FROM THE WISE 319

I enclose for your inspection two or three of my
better efforts, hoping to elicit from you a word of com-
ment and advice. If without merit or promise, your
telling me so will make me happy, and if the contrary,
encouragement will give me strength to do as you may
be pleased to advise.

With profound respect, I remain your humble servant
and admirer, J. W. Riley.

Having mailed the letter there followed a ten days'
suspense. Time hung heavily over Greenfield. "Ten
days !" said Riley, drawling out the words ; "it — ^was —
ten — ^weeks. Every hour I grew more doubtful of an
answer from Longfellow. I was told the last thing he
wanted to do was to give an opinion of other people's
poems. My head was full of suspicions — ^my letter
might not reach him — ^he might be sick, and so forth.
The opiate for my perturbation was *The Spanish
Student.' It was soothing to read it. I was in love
and like the Student confronted with the awful mystery
of Life."

There was another cause for his perturbation. He
was wrestling with his new poem, "Fame." Many
waves broke upon the "seashore of his mind." One
night

"The loud and ponderous mace of Time
Knocked at the golden portals of the day,"

before he slept. Recalling the night, he talked of phan-
toms that filled the air, and how the silence was
haunted by the ghosts of sound. There were "strange
cracks and tickings, the rustling of garments that have
no substance in them, and the tread of dreadful feet,
that would leave no mark on the sea-sand or the winter
snow." He had a vision of fame, but it did not "make

320 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

the night glorious with its smile." What he saw was
the fame of a man

"Who journeyed on through life, unknown.
Without one friend to call his own ;
No sympathetic sob or sigh
Of trembling lips — no sorrowing eye
Looked out through tears to see him die."

It seems relevant to note here that "Fame" was not
written in a night. There was time for suggestions
from the "Golden Girl." "The poem," he said, "re-
quired the revision and reconstruction of weeks."
Changes occurred up to the very month of its publica-
tion in the EaHhamite of Earlham College, February,
1877.

Riley had been blessed with the vision of his mis-
sion, but poets, like other mortals, if they do their
work, must have their crust of bread. It was literally
true that he had less money than his Schoolmaster
who had none — for he was in debt. In his extremity,
he had decided to replenish his exchequer by favor-
ably answering another call from the Graphic Com-
pany, when, like a breath from Araby, came a letter
from the "Golden Girl," which made it more than a
mere fancy of hers that she held in her "weak white
hands" his hopes and fortune. Gaunt starvation must
be vanquished, but not by wasting time with the
"Graphics." The wandering desire for travel and
money was fatal. In those doubtful weeks she gave
him courage. "Her mirth," he said, "was like a zephyr
challenging the East Wind." As she saw it, the new
poet could do anything. "I say," she wrote, rallying
him on his fertility of resources, "did you ever teach
school or sell sewing machines ?" Then she grew seri-
ous; her love "reached over the endless sea of

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LIGHT AND COUNSEL FROM THE WISE 321

absence." She wanted to feel the presence of the hand
that had fashioned so many beautiful messages. ''And
you are going away with the 'Graphics' ? I am sorry.

'I can't quite make it clear,
It seems so horrid queer.'

I wish I might whisper to you all the rare diamonds of
thought Hope flings at my feet to-day."

While struggling with his new poem and doubting in
himself what to do for^'a living, Riley was prompted to
call at the post-office and this is what he found :

Cambridge, Nov. 30, 1876.
My Dear Sir :

Not being in the habit of criticising the productions
of others, I can not enter into any minute discussion of
the merits of the poems you send me.

I can only say in general terms that I have read
them with great pleasure, and think they show the true
poetic faculty and insight.

The only criticism I shall make is on your use of the
word prone in the thirteenth line of "Destiny." Prone
means face-downward. You meant to say supine, as
the context shows.

I return the printed pieces, as you may want them
for future use, and am, my Dear Sir, with all good
wishes. Yours very truly,

Henry W. Longfellow.

But one result could follow. To borrow his own
words, he was "in a perfect hurricane of delight." He
walked away from the post-office, not through the
streets of Greenfield, but "through some enchanted
city, where the pavements were of air; where all the
rough sounds of a stirring town were softened into
gentle music; where everjrthing was happy; where
there was no distance and no time."

822 JAMES WHITCOMB BILEY

''Gently his pathway turned from night;
The hills swung open to the light ;
And on his fortune's farther side
He saw the hilltops glorified."

The hour had arrived for that old faithful dock, the
Greenfield Democrat, to strike again. Under the cap-
tion, Our Poet, the editor printed the Longfellow letter
and commented upon ''the poetic merits of our young
fellow townsman, James W. Riley. We are gratified
to learn that his poetic talent has not only been appre-
ciated by his friends at home, but has received the
recognition of America's most ^ninent poet. The
Democrat is proud of having one among us whose
brilliant future is almost assured, and by way of en-
couragement reminds our young friend that

'Poets have undoubted right to claim.

If not the greatest, the most lasting name.' "

The Schoolmaster rejoiced that his "winter of dis-
content was made glorious summer by this sun of the
Muses. Do you recall the days/' he asks Riley, "we
used to spend together under the beech trees at the old
schoolhouse, when we were several years younger than
now, the days we strayed like the breeze among the
blossoms ?

'When Hope clung feeding, like a bee.
And Love and Life went a-Maying
With Nature, Faith and Poesy*?"

He then warns Riley that Pegasus is frequently
refractory. "You may have," he added, "a whole
week of jubilant exultation — a week of con-
stant dashing hither and thither upon your
winged steed — sometimes among the clouds, some-
times above the stars — a hand upon the rein and

LIGHT AND COUNSEL FROM THE WISE 323

he obeys, a touch with the heel and he flies, until the
whole earth lies beneath you, and all its inexhaustible
wealth of beautiful imafi^ery is at your conmiand and
then — a balk — a halt — a fall — and Helicon a mole-hill
— Hippocrene a mud puddle — and Pegasus a mule,
braying for his fodder."

His friend, B. S. Parker, sent congratulations, but
warned Riley not to "feel too much flattered, but to
proceed discreetly, to cultivate the acquaintance of
other distinguished and influential men of letters." Nor
must he "feel greatly grieved or disheartened if some
should snub him." Parker had had gratifying letters,
but "they had done him no further good than the mo-
mentary bliss they had occasioned."

It is a great event, it has been said, for a young
writer to receive his first letter from a great man.
"He can never receive letters enough from famous men
afterward to obliterate that one, or dim the memory
of the pleasant surprise it was and the gratification it
gave him. Lapse of time can not make it common-
place or cheap." As to the memory of it, this was true
of Riley. The Longfellow letter was his pearl of great
price, but, unlike Aldrich, he did not caress it as an
autographic treasure to the end of his days. He
carried it in his "reticule" a year or so, then laid
it away and saw it no more. Again it was — "Trust
in Providence and in his own efforts." The con-
viction was borne in upon him that there is but
one straight road to success and that is merit.
Capacity lacked not opportunity. It could not
forever remain undiscovered. Letters from the dis-
tinguished never had made a young writer great and
never could. God would not have it so. Each writer,
with fear and trembling, had to work out his own lit-

324 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

erary salvation. Some have thought that had Long-
fellow written Riley that his poems were without merit
or promise, his literary ambitions would have come
suddenly to an end. Reporters have made him say:
"I made up my mind if Longfellow said *No/ I would
quit all that kind of thing forever." He never said it.
One adverse criticism could not have overcome his na-
tive tendency. The impulse to write was so powerful
that escape from it was inconceivable. As late as 1879,
while painting a sign to earn his daily bread, this im-
pelling force was sufficient to bring him down the
ladder to write a poem.

Among other lessons he learned from the letter was
the value one should attach to words. Henceforth he
would study their use and abuse. When his poem,
"A Vision of Summer," "warmed him through and
through with tropical delight," he lay supine — thanks
to Longfellow — not prone.

'On grassy swards, where the skies, like eyes,
Look lovingly back to mine."

Almost immediately he made use of the letter to
thaw out the icy East. He wrote and illustrated a
'^serio-humorous poem," **The Funny Little Fellow,"
and sent it to Scribner's. He felt certain his illustra-
tions were as good as the average found in **Bric-a-
Brac" of that monthly. It was a good idea to combine
both poet and artist. "I backed up my ability with my
Longfellow letter," said he. "You can imagine my
chagrin when I received their 'Respectfully Declined.' '*

The first letter to Longfellow was a legitimate per-
formance, but the second, in Riley*s own words, "was
unwarranted and inexcusable. I made the mistake
most writers make; having received a good letter, I

LIGHT AND COUNSEL FROM THE WISE 325

must, forsooth, have another. They say Longfellow
was grim when they came to steal his time. Grim?
When maidens came with their manuscripts in blue
velvet, and young men with carpetbags full of poems,
he should have frowned till they heard Thor hurling
thunder !"

Riley never could be quite penitent enough — ^when he
grew older and realized what the infliction meant — for
having been so stupid as to send another carpetbagf ul.
To enclose "The Iron Horse" and one or two other
short poems would not have been so bad, but with them
to send "A Remarkable Man,'' "Tale of a Spider," and
"Flying Islands of the Night," was a Grub-Street
offense for which there was no pardon. Nevertheless,
he sent them, although, as he said, "two years elapsed
before I was stupid enough to do it." The following
letter accompanied them, which received a prompt
answer :

Greenfield, Ind., Sept. 2, 1878.
Henry W. Longfellow —

Dear Sir : Emboldened by a very kind and encourag-
ing letter received from you some two years since, I
take the liberty of enclosing to you some of my later
work. And I desire again to express to you my warm-
est thanks for the great good both your influence and
kind words have done me. While I have not been
recognized by the magazines, I have a reputation in my
own state of which I am proud, and through it I am not
only making progress but money as well.

The poetical drama I enclose, as you will see, is with-
out ambition, yet for all that I most certainly trust you
will find in it something pleasurable. Regretting to
afflict you with the additional trouble of returning the
scraps, I am

Most Truly and Gratefully yours,

J. W. Riley.

326 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

Cambridge, Sept 5, 1878.

My Dear Sir :

I have received the poems you were kind enough to
send me, and have read the lyric pieces with much
pleasure.

"The Flying Islands of the Night" I have not yet
read, being very busy just now with many things. As
you say I may keep it, I will do so, and read it care-
fully at some favorable moment.

The other poems I return as you desire, and am, my
Dear Sir, Yours very truly,

Henry W. Longfellow.

P. S. — ^Among these poems the one that pleased me
much as any, if not more than any, was "The Iron
Horse."

The letter that could prompt the beautiful sonnet to
Longfellow was not a mistake after all. One still hears
the trees whispering to him and the winds talking with
him confidingly:

"His verse blooms like a flower, night and day;
Bees cluster round his rhjnnes ; and twitterings
Of lark and swallow, in an endless May
Are mingling with the tender songs he sings.''

What effect Riley's letters and poems had on Long-
fellow is largely conjecture. Reviewers have thought
his "Possibilities" was the result. It may be true, for
it is a matter of record that the sonnet was written in
1882, after Riley's call at the Craigie House in January
of that year. "Come into my study," said the poet,
"it is more like freedom here; we can talk and be
content." At his request Riley read "Old Fashioned
Roses." "Delightful ! delightful !" repeated Longfellow.
They talked of "our native poets and their work.'*
Longfellow knew them all and "loved them aU^-aveu

LIGHT AND COUNSEL FROM THE WISE 327

the humblest." They talked particularly of "western
characteristics and dialects and the possibilities of the
West for song/'

"Where are the Poets V* asks Longfellow in the son-
net;

"Perhaps there lives some dreamy boy, untaught
In schools, some graduate of the field or street,
Who shall become a master of the art,
An admiral sailing the high seas of thought,
Fearless and first, and steering with his fleet
For lands not yet laid down in any chart/'

Riley never claimed to be an admiral sailing the
high seas, but he was untaught of the schools. Without
any chart he steered fearless and first into a new field
of song. The whole of twenty years, beginning with
the year of his vision, was a constant fight with the
critics for the rights and merits of that field.

Letters from celebrities, with one exception, made lit-
tle impression on him. No answer came from Whit-
tier, but that disappointment was soon softened by the
sympathy of Trowbridge. "Sjrmpathizingly Yours"
stayed with him to the year of his departure (1916)
and Trowbridge with his four score and ten years
was permitted to see the dawn of the same year.

Arlington, Mass., Dec 1, 1876.
Mr. J. W. Riley,

Dear Sir: I recognize touches here and there in
these little pieces, which indicate a good deal of fancy
& sjrmpathy — prime requisites in the writing of verse ;
but neither of them seems to have that original force
necessary to conceive & complete a really striking poem.
This may be in you yet, though your 26 years may not
have enabled you — so far — ^to master it. With what
talent these pieces show, you may undoubtedly write

328 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

pleasing and perhaps popular pieces; but to be mar-
ketable & to make its mark, poetry must nowadays be
in some respect striking.
I am Sympathizingly Yours,

J. T. TROWBRmCE.

Trowbridge as "Paul Creyton'* with his popular tales
for the young, had caught the attention of Greenfield
several years prior to his letter to Riley. As editor of
Our Young Follcs, he drew Riley's attention to the lit-
erary significance of the Child-World. Longfellow had
given but a hint of its riches. There was a call for
some one to take up the theme where he left it. Some
one should try his genius on childhood. Children should
lisp and whisper their messages to us, tell us

''What the birds and the winds are singing
In their sunny atmosphere."

Trowbridge had also set Riley reflecting on the im-
portance of frontier material for poetry. Some one,
Trowbridge thought, should seek it in tlie Backwoods
Enchanted, go back among old armchairs, old-fash-
ioned spinning-wheels and dismantled looms, search
among dusty cobwebs, find

"Far under the eaves, the bunch of sage,
The satchel hung on its nail, amid
The heirlooms of a bygone age."

But let him beware! "Facts are facts," said Trow-
bridge, "but if not clothed with grace and the warm tis-
sues of human sjnnpathy, they are no more the truth
than a skeleton is a living body."

The first to direct Riley's attention to the wonderland
of poetry in his immediate surroundings was his
schoolmaster, Lee 0. Harris. Trowbridge was the
second. There was a third.

LIGHT AND COUNSEL FROM THE WISE 329

One afternoon in October, 1876, while Riley was
aglow with the vision of his mission, there came to
Greenfield a man who as an orator had few peers in
his generation, Robert G. IngersoU. His speech — a
political one in the heat of a national campaign —
was embellished with poems in prose, which seemed
to Riley the gift of the gods. He listened for
two hours to eloquence that remained golden in mem-
ory for forty years. Extolling the splendor of the new
day, the orator said : ''Nothing is more marvelous than
the common everyday facts of everyday life. The age
of wonders is not in the past. There are millions of
miracles under our feet. In the lives of the people, here
and now, are all the comedy and tragedy they can com-
prehend." Before closing, the orator touched upon
another important fact : that the luster of noble quali-
ties shines alike in the plainest workman and the most
accomplished gentleman. Indeed it had shone under
a rough exterior and had been wanting in the polished
scholar. The hairy, unsocial savage who knew how to
get things done, and got them done, was a better serv-
ant of his country than one who, without the positive
qualification, happened to be intellectually eminent

It was a center shot ; it went straight to Riley's heart.
Scales fell from his eyes. He saw his field. Better yet,
he saw as never before the glory of the imperfect and
the commonplace. He attached greater value to his
surroundings. Referring to the orator he said, bor-
rowing the familiar lines,

"I know not what this man may be^
Sinner or saint; but as for me.
One thing I know, that I am he
Who once was blind and now I see !"

That day he saw what his friend John Burrous^

880 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

wrote at a later period, that the lure of the distant is
deceptive ; that the great opportunity is where we are :
"Every place is under the stars, every place is the
centre of the world" — ^his native town with its neigh-
boring county-seats, Anderson, Newcastle, Rushville,
Shelbyville and Indianapolis, encircled a kingdom large
enough for the exercise of his powers. That contracted
circle was also wide enough for a degree of rapture he
never experienced in the heyday of fame. Yearning
for the hilltops glorified, "lacking everything save
faith and a great purpose,'' he was in a hundred ways
happier than he was in later years, when success show-
ered upon him applause and gold.

It is a literal fact that within a radius of forty miles
of Greenfield, Riley found all the material for his poems.
What he found outside the circle was accidental and
had its counterpart within it. Here were all the com-
edy and tragedy of human life ; here a million miracles
under his feet ; here the center of the world. Since he
touched the heartstrings in his own community, since
the history of the nation is the history of communities
written large, and since human nature is the same the
world over, his songs were destined to be universally
loved.

CHAPTER XVI

ON THE TRIPOD OF THE DEMOCRAT

ONCE more the lights of his native streets had
become feeble tapers — once more the Argonaut
sought his fortune in Anderson — ^not on the
"Buckeye," but on a county paper.

"Beneath the lamplight's scorching shade,
With eyes all wild, and lips all pale,
He courts the Muse. Read from his pen, —
The DEMOCRAT. This tells the tale."

His purse-strings were contracted and Greenfield
could not relax them. "Why an appetite/' he quiz-
zically asked ; "what is the good of cutting your wisdom
teeth when there is nothing to eat in the house but a
butcher's bill and a dun for rent?"

The yearning of this man for freedom from the bond-
age of debt is one of the many pathetic phases of his
existence. Other artists, the "British Book" said,
painted to live, but John Opie lived to paint, and that
was identically the relation Riley desired to sustain to
poetry — ^not to write poems to live, but live to write
'poems.

Perhaps, after all, the bitter experience was the way
of Destiny to bruise his heart, that its door of sympathy
might be always open to the need and distress of the
world. He never sought money for ignoble ends, never
bowed the knee before it as a worshipper, but he craved
it for personal benefit that he might tiiereby do a work
of universal benefit At Greenfield and for years after

831

832 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

he moved to the city, Riley often talked to friends in
the guise of the light-hearted Skimpole, overwhelming
them with money — "in his expansive intentions/'
''He had no more idea of wages than a bluebird/'
said his friend Reed. "Money was a mystery/' It
had the color of magic. In the folk tales, the caps of
fairies and musicians were red — and gold was red.
As late as the year of his first book (1883), he sighs
for the "red ruddocks/' "You must not forget," he
wrote his friend Parker, "that in the pecuniary aspect
I present the picturesque outlines of the typical poet^
merry, at times, thank God, as Chispa describes the
Serenaders who enjoy hunger by day and noise by
night/' There were gloomy days — ^but never a
moment for surrender. "Merry," he sometimes
repeated when at work, "merry as old Skimpole/*
Creditors "might pluck his feathers now and then, and
clip his wings, but all the same he would work and
sing." "Afterwhile," he merrily wrote another friend,

"Afterwhile — ^the poet-man
Will do better when he can —
Afterwhile, with deep regrets.
He will even pay his debts ;
And by drayload, cart and hack.
Will take borrowed volumes back.
And will gibber, shriek and smile —
When he brings 'em — afterwhile !"

There were occasions at night however when he was
really blue, when he had to sing himself to sleep with
some such "rhythmical tumult" as,

"I am weary of waiting, and weary of tears.
And my heart wearies, too, all these desolate years.
Moaning over the one only song that it knows-, —
The little red ribbon, tiie ring and the rose/'

ON THE TRIPOD OF THE DEMOCRAT 333

Prior to emplojnnent on the Anderson Democrat, he
made several fruitless attempts to secure a place in
some editorial room. Painting signs was not the only
way to make a living. "I had once," he writes Parker
of the Newcastle Mercury, late in 1876, ''a few weeks'
experience as the local editor of our little paper. I
liked it better than anything I ever tried to do, and I
write to say that I would like to be with you in that
capacity. I would be willing and glad to work for
whatever you were able to pay for such help, if help is
desired. Please revolve it around your brain a time or
two and tell me your conclusion." It turned out that
the Mercury was "a bankrupt organ without a coppa:
for contributors."

The long winter months, and the glare of the snows.
With never a glimmer of sun in the skies,"

wore on to the following '*WORD" in the Democrat-^
the last week in April, 1877 :

It is our endeavor to serve the best interests of our
patrons, and with this in view, we have secured the
services of Mr. J. W. Riley, who has attained quite a
reputation as a poet and writer. His productions have
already attracted the attention of such men as Long-
fellow, Whittier, Trowbridge and many other notables ;
and being convinced of the high order of the talent he
possesses in that direction, we believe we not only
benefit ourselves and patrons by the acquisition of his
services, but that he is also supplied with a congenial
position, and one in which he will develop the highest
attributes of his nature. Feeling that we already have
the hearty endorsement of a kindly public, we leave Mr.
Riley to close the homily.

ToDiSMAN & Groan (Proprietors) .

834 JAMES WHITC0M6 RILEY

•

In making my salam to the Anderson public, I desire
first to extend my warmest thanks to those who have
interested themselves in my behalf, and whose kindly
influence has assisted me to an office I will ever feel a
pleasure in occupying. And in the fulfillment of the
duties that devolve upon me, it shall be my earnest en-
deavor to merit the trust and confidence that has been
so generously reposed. That the position is one that is
fraught with a thousand trials and vexations, shall not
deter me from the steadfast purpose of right and jus-
tice ; and while I shall at times exercise the lighter attri-
butes which go to make up the interest of a weddy, it
shall be my care as well, to weed away all petty slurs
that choke the growth of dignity, and in fact, to nurture
jealously the character of the paper, and assist in my
humble way in giving to its individuality the stamp
which ''bears without abuse the grand old name of gen-
tleman/' Trusting the kindly indulgence of the public
for any discrepancy of inexperience, I am,

Yours truly,

J. W. RiLBY.

There were doubtless many cups of happiness in An-
derson, but none quite so full as that which Riley held
when he entered the Democrat office. For the first
time in his life he was under contract at a regular sal-
ary— forty dollars a month. When at the end of the
first month, the circulation was doubled and his salary
raised to sixty, his cup ran over. That was unmistak-
able testimony to the merit of the "acquisition." (The
"thousand trials and vexations" had not yet arrived.)
There came also exchanges with their compliments.
"One of the best writers among the young litterateurs
of the west," said the Indianapolis Herald. "A good
thing for the Democrat," said the Newcastle Mercury.
The Earlhamite, which had given wings to his poem,
"Fame," sent its best wishes and hoped "he would find
many roses in the pathway of life." "Our rising Indiana

ON THE TRIPOD OF THE DEMOCRAT 835

poet/' said the Richmond Independent, 'Trails us from
the tripod of the Anderson Democrat, a newsy, bright-
faced paper, which will grow under the spell of his ver-
satile genius. A capital, illustrated burlesque, 'Maud
MuUer/ adorns the first page, the artistic and poetical
production of the new aspirant to editorial honors."

The merriment "Maud Muller" created was consid-
erable. There was a ripple among the exchanges when

"The sweet girl stood in the sun that day,
And raked the Judge instead of the hay.''

And a ripple was all Riley intended. "It was a mere
bagatelle," he said. That any one should consider it a
poetical production was to "steep his mirth in chagrin."
The original "Maud MuUer" had been dramatized and
Whittier had "utterly disowned her," which fact sug-
gested the little diversion at the Quaker Poet's expense.

Very soon the man beneath the lamplight's scorching
shade was known around town as the *Terspiring
Poet." And truly the work he accomplished from April
to September, 1877, was extraordinary. He was liter-
ally an eagle-eyed Argus, meditating, playing, working,
and perspiring by day and by night on his weekly
tripod. If there was anjrthing in Anderson or Madison
County that escaped his telescopic or microscopic vi-
sion, his fellow citizens failed to find it.

Among the manifold things he did was to "embellish
the news." Trowbridge's counsel bore fruit from the
first. The bare facts sent in from Kill Buck, Poliwag,
and Weasel Prairie, were not the truth till clothed with
his sparkling humor. Country correspondents scarcely
recognized their prosy items, after they had passed
through the Democrat's "humorous mill." They read
them with inconceivable surprise and glee.

336 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

Brightwood, for example, was "the little station
down the Bee Line that did not possess enough dignity
to stop a train/'

A carpenter, shingling a bam at Prosperity, "slipped
from the roof and shot over the eaves like a bull-frog."

Captain Doxey's "mocking bird" was a "twittering
pilgrim, and when properly wound up played three
tunes; but the ratchet slipped occasionally and 'Cap-
tain Jinks' and 'Molly Darling* flew into each other
with a vehemence that was blood-curdling."

"Our Editor is running round the country like a
water-bug, and a perfect nebula of new subscribers be-
spangles our subscription list;

The lark is up to meet the sun,

The bee is on the wing ;
The Democrat it has begun

To go like everything."

A team ran away at Perkinsville. "The horses got
down to their work and for a time

'Beneath their spurning feet the road
Like an arrowy Alpine river flowed.' "

"While with joy akin to rapture we cluster round the
glowing grate and settle comfortably to the entrancing
task of our 'Ode to May,' let us not forget the anguish
of our unfortunate neighbor as he buries himself in the
bleak and barren basement of his heart and wonders
bitterly what his fussy old consort meant by having him
take down the sitting room stove so soon."

"If the young man who sends us the poetry begin-
ning 'How beautiful iz the birds' will bring us the
address of his parents, we will see that his remains
reach home in safety."

The sweet Goddess of Spring had been coquetting.

ON THE TRIPOD OF THE DEMOCRAT 837

but now "she has unrolled her emerald carpet over the
world ; thrown to the winds her leafy banners ; touched
with her mystic wand the folded bud, and wooed it into
bloom. She has scattered, too, with lavish hand the
feathered seeds of song and called to life the glad voice
of the brook ; the sunshine is a gleaming smile of gold
throughout the day; and in the night, whose strange
weird beauty awes us like a gipsy maiden's eyes, the
ebon back of the Thomas cat is arched, and his quiver-
ing tail points to the solemn stars/'

These and scores of other items equally humorous,
accompany the following lines that appeared in his
"invocation" column to the business public—

"Come to the sanctum board to-night,
And friendship there will be your gain,— •
For where the Democrat is found
No sorrow can remain."

There was a passage in the Life of the "Cornish Won-
der," John Opie, that appealed to Riley with special sig-
nificance. According to Opie, he who wishes to be a
painter must not overlook any kind of knowledge, and,
as Riley saw it, the law is the same for the poet.

On entering the Democrat office, he immediately put
"the painter's injunction" into practice. Wide-awake
as a lamp-lighter he went down the streets and up the
alleys, through the highways and byways for materials.
Nor did he have to stare at things to know what and
where they were. It was current opinion that *Tie
could look down the shelves of a hardware store and
see at a glance everything on them." In June the
Democrat began to mass materials. For weeks it
harped on "practical things" — ^three to five columns an
issue. It made its bow in —

838 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

AN IDYL OF TO-DAY

The Blunt Blade of Business
Ground to an Ethereal Edge.

OUR POET AT THE CRANK
Motto : "Grind till the last armed foe expires."

INVOCATION

0 Courteous Muse, you have served me so long
As guide through the devious highways of song;
And ever have led me with willingest hand
Adown the dim aisles of that fanciful land,
Where even Aladdin — ^the luckiest scamp

That ever was spared by a kerosene lamp —

Not happier was or more burdened with bliss

Than the poor, impecunious writer of this.

And as I recall with rapturous thrill

The ripe fruits of rhyme which I gathered at will —

The lush, juicy clusters on Poesy's tree

That weighed down the limbs to accommodate me, —

The jet of my thanks flashes into a blaze

That will brighten my life all the rest of my days.

And so, as the gas glimmers over my brow

And gleams on the pencil I'm writing with now —

And glances from that with a jocular flash

To redden my already ruddy mustache ; —

1 can but give over all yearnings for fame,
To write a few lines with the singular aim
Of pleasing the world with an idyl that rings
The music of business and practical things.

It was a bid for business to open its alcoves for the
poet's inspection. "There is no cessation of the ardu-
ous labors of my position," he wrote his Schoolmaster
in July, "and I am grateful for it, for I think the news-
paper school an excellent one and filled with most valu-
able experience. I am still at the crank, but even with

ON THE TRIPOD OF THE DEMOCRAT 339

that I have daily acquired some new proficiency. I
have written many poems that I have laid away — ^the
kind I publish are only intended for the casual reader,
as you know. The better ones I reserve for better dis-
tinction."

The casual reader saw such "literary atrocities'* as
"Craqueodoom" and "Wrangdillion," such inferior
fruits of labor as "The Frog," which he termed his
batrachian idyl, "A Man of Many Parts," "A Test of
Love," "George Mullen's Confession," "Wash Lowry's
Reminiscence" and "Now We Can Sleep, Mother," the
latter a parody on the old familiar "Rock Me To Sleep,"
celebrating the expiration of the sewing machine pat-
ent. The drudgery of millions of poor women was at
an end. "Broken was the sewing machine monopoly —
snapped the last thread of tyranny that bound a starv-
ing people hand and foot ;

"Backward, throw backward the curtain to-night,
Open the window and let the glad light
Of the round moon shimmer over the scene
Where we at last own a sewing machine."

The casual reader also saw, and muddled his wits
with such incoherent prose effusions as "The Duck
Creek Jabberwock," "Unawangawawa ; or The Eyelash
of the Lightning," "Trillpipe's Boy on Spiders," and
'The Anderson Mystery," — ^the first, the story of "a
strange animal of the basket-backed species in a neck
of the woods where they never read the Bible or take
the Democrat''; the last, the tale of a Healthy Ghost,
"facts without fancy about a mysterious lodger that
sheltered its goblin head" within the walls of a haunted
house, some such mystery as the echoes of footsteps on
the Ghost's Walk when tiie dusky wings of solitude sat

340 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

brooding upon Chesney Wold. The "Perspiring Poet"
had searched the house "from turret to foundation
stone, gone through the floor like the genii in some en-
chanted palace, had peeped under the sleepers and
emerged in a coil of cobwebs with the unfathomable
mystery — ^and hoped the day would soon dawn when he
could give his readers a full biography of the ghostly
visitor, with pen-portrait, including stature, weighty
color of eyes and hair."

The "Jingling Editor" began his "idyl on business"
with a curtsy to the main-floor room under his officep
where the clangor of iron-ware contrasted painfully
with the silence he craved when the Muse was indul-
gent:

"Here on the balcony, a sign
Somewhat marred by the rain and the shine
Of a dozen years, still checks the stare
Of the passer-by with the word 'Hardware !'
While a portly man in the door below —
Making the sign more apropos —
Stands, in a loosely-fitting sack,
With his legs wide out and his hat set back,
But an open face and a genial air
Shows that his heart is a softer ware
Than the goods he keeps in the store-room there.
Stretching along on either side
Of the walls of the warehouse long and wide.
The shelving sags with the heavy weight
Of hinges, hoes, and the chains that grate
Their tinkling links on the gleaming blades
Of the scythes below, and the rakes and spades ;
And the thousand nameless instruments
That the tireless mind of man invents
For the tradesman's use, or the farmer's hand,
Or the sportman's need, or the smith's demand ;
Till even the eye as it looks on these—
Dazzled is it with the sight it sees."

John Townsend Tbowbbidge
From II gihotograpb takeu in 1872

ON THE TRIPOD OF THE DEMOCRAT 341

"The huge appetite of the public for wonders re-
quires daily food/' "The Poet at the Crank" knew it —
and supplied the demand in cargoes. No weekly editor
reached the rural districts as did Riley. Farmers called
to see him. They came with their families — and
brought gifts from their gardens and orchards. Bou-
quets "blossomed on his table while their fragrance
hovered on odorous wings about the dusty crannies of
bis office." Once when the street in front of his bal-
cony was congested with wagons that had brought
families with their applause from the country, he was
reminded of huzzas for the "Cornish Wonder." "These
coaches of nobility," he jestingly observed, "are be-
come a nuisance to the neighborhood."

The keynote of his success lay in this, the establish-
ment of a friendly relation between town and country
— and he was about the first man in America to do it.
"Without the farmer," he said, "the town can not flour-
ish. Ye men of the streets, be cordial to our rustic
brethren. They are more potent than bankers and law-
yers, more essential to the public good than poets and
politicians. Do all you can for them. Farmers should
vibrate wisely and heartily between the Public Square
and the farm — ^and we of the town should do the same.
The golden mean escapes the plagues that haunt the
extremes.

Could I pour out the nectar the gods only can,

I would fill up my glass to the brim

And drink the success of the Suburban Man.''

Said a matronly mother, the idol of a happy family,
"The poet just threw his arms around our county and
took it to see the sights. He regaled us with the wit
that had been the talk of his sign-painting. Such

342 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

cleverness in versifying, our town had never known."
"The mock seriousness/' says a writer, "with which
he took himself and the Democrat made it for a time
a more welcome sheet in Anderson than would have
been a comic almanac/'

"Dear ever indulgent and generous Muse,
You may give me occasional lifts if you choose —
If not I shall stagger along all the same,
And so, if I falter, why, yours is the blame."

Down the streets and up the lanes he went with the
public in his "Rhyme Wagon" — and the magical thing
about it was that the public could ride in it and at the
same time sit by the lamplight of home.

" 'Make way for Liberty !' (he said)
Made way for Liberty, and led
A grateful people on to where
A ceaseless clamor filled the air;
And countless hammers beat and banged
And iron echoes clanked and clanged
As if new worlds were just begun
By workingmen at Anderson."

He took the curious gaze of worldly eyes to the new
Machine Shop where the pulse of labor

"Gilded bands and polished steel.
And strange machines whose works reveal
The master minds that have resigned
Their thoughts to benefit mankind."

Then through "cinder alley" to the Repair Shop,
where the off-hand mare had kicked the end gate out
of the wagon, splintered the single-tree

"And sprung the tongue, till — ^I declare! —
'Twas enough to make a preacher swear."

Then across the railroad (with apologies to Byron
and his "Waterloo") to hear the sound of ripplery in

ON THE TRIPOD OF THE DEMOCRAT 843

the Planing Mill. There artisans had gathered in noisy
array — -.

"A hundred hearts beat happily; and when
Sawdust arose with its voluptuous smell,
Red eyes looked work to eyes as red again
And all went merry as a married belle.
But hush ! hark ! a deep sound strikes like a
rising knell."

Did ye not hear it? It was not the wind, nor the car
rattling o'er the stony street. It was the roar of the
Mill on a rampage with the whistles that spilled dis-
cordant shrieks from their brazen throats, sweet to the
hungry men at twelve o'clock as melody to the heart of
a poet.

Then to the Retail District, where the Babel of busi-
ness was bewildering, where clerks were caroling gay
and

"The chorus ever echoes on and on,
And swells in volume till the glee
Is wafted over land and sea."

To the comer room of the hotel where the jeweler
blossoms like a Persian king in affluence :

"Who but he
Could read a watch's pedigree?
A Chieftain to the Highlands bound.
Who missed the 'Accommodation,'
Pulled out his watch and took it round
To Shirk for reparation.
And Shirk squints sharply through the glass —
He took a pair of 'pinchers,'
And raised a little wheel of brass
And nipped it with his clinchers,
And put it back, and oiled the works.
And cleaned the graven border ;
And watch and man went out of Shirk's
In perfect running order."

344 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

Oh, that mammoth stock of shoes — gaiters, carpet
slippers, and red-top boots with copper-tips for the
children I

" 'What boots it?* Shakespeare asks —
We answer Conwell's Store ;
For never boots were better made.
Or sold as cheaply to the trade
In Anderson before."

"And don't forget some cash to pay the pedler*' —
scan those bright faces behind the glass at the Citizen's
Bank,

"Walk up to the counter and lay down a check.
And see the cashier lightly curving his neck
Evincing that he's not a moneyless wreck."

Feast the eye on the tints of fashion, the reds, and
the blues and modest hues, and the flowers that light
the gloom of the millinery room,

"Where the goods are all new
And as fresh and as pure as the pearliest dew
That jewels the jasmine in jauntiest May.

The ties and cuffs

And laces and ruffs.
And all the little fancy stuffs

Are too sublime

For idle rhyme
To ever dare the heights to climb."

Stop at the Bon Ton Shaving Parlor where the mus-
tache is made as soft and fair as silks of the com in
the summer air ; see the barber

Strop his razor till it gleams
Brighter than the light that beams
From the moon on winter snow
When the sleighbells come and go."

ON THE TRIPOD OF THE DEMOCRAT 845

Up a winding stair — a lunge and a jerk — a thump
and a bump — sl rough road for the "Rhyme Wagon" to
go, — up to ring a little bell, up to the Gallery "to see
the picture of the man with an album in his hand";
and before descending, a pause on the balcony in the
shade of the catalpa tree to see if the world, morbid
and turbid in its greed for pelf, wears the color of
romance it wore in youth: —

"Twitter me something low and sweet,
Over the din of the noisy street,
Coax a sound from the ivory keys,
And fling it out on the fevered breeze
Like a spray of dew on a drooping flower
That blooms again at the magic power, — r
And the restless hearts that beat below
Perchance may dream of the Long Ago,
And sigh with a rapture of bliss
For an era more refulgent than this
And feel again in some sweet refrain.
Release from the chafing strife for gain."

Pegasus was on the brink of a flight from the bal-
cony when the "blunt blade of business" re-hitched
him to the "Rhyme Wagon" and he descended to the
Corner Store

"Just across the street
Where foreign fruits, and pineapples
And oranges are sweet
And fresh as when in Tropic climes
They ripened in the sun,
And never dreamed of better times."

Farther down the street to the store where the
"Giant Boot Alls a space on the sidewalk as large as
any man in town" ; on to the Palace where wool-delaines
and calicoes are kept; upstairs again to the Dentist
where moans are spiced —

316 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

"With writhings, shriek and shout
While the shrew has her teeth jerked out."

Down the Main street again to the Merchant who would
not advertise, whose name, mysteriously known to
fame, was never seen in the Democrat;

"And hence the Muse was prone to balk
With sorrow-moistened eyes,
And sigh to think she could not talk
Of tact and enterprise."

Across the way to the Druggist who has the "rinktum"
for the stomach when Old Man Ague comes around
"shaking hands with everybody, shaking legs, and feet,
and toes, till his wracked and wretched victims long to
shake his acquaintance."

See the "crowd of customers happy as a circus-band
come to town." History sings of the virtues and
Verse carols

"The praise of the Grocery men
Who have built them a notable name.
Their faces bright as Prosperity's when
She toots on the trumpet of Fame."

Then to the Book Store for croquet sets, rustic
brackets, fancy paper — and the news and photographic
views ; to the Furniture Store where the farmer pulled
out his pocketbook and bought his wife a parlor set ;

"And when she still insisted
That she knew no end of cares.
His money roll untwisted.
For a set of sofa chairs."

From Bacchus who crushed "the sweet poison from
the purple grape" to Tennyson who spiced the ban-
quet with "drinking songs — and the dust of death/'
poets have sung the praise or blame of wine. And

ON THE TRIPOD OF THE DEMOCRAT 347

since, in a wild frenzy, the "Crank was flaunting every-
thing aloft like a flag," — ^rhyming of sulkies, gristmills,
mattress springs, undertakers, public jokes, the Public
Purse, cigars, potatoes, fish and fowl, and "everything
the market affords from East to West," — since it was
thus and so, there slipped from his pen a fragment for
"the juice that drippeth from the grape."

"And now the jolly Muse, with rosy lip
Bedecked with crimson dew, must sing the praise
Of wines that heaven knows have caught the fire
Of some forgotten sun and kept it through
A hundred years of gloom still glowing in
A heart of ruby."

There was a rare assortment — ripe vintages of all de-
scriptions : Old Port Rye ; Kentucky Bourbon —

"Liquors that so strangely lubricate
The grooves of life that all the world slides by
Without a jar or care of discontent, —
Proof brandies that the doctors recommend
In feverous times, when skeleton disease.
In trailing robes of pestilence bedight.
Stalks grimly through the land, and feeds the grave
with mortals."

Lest the "Crusaders" protest too vehemently, he
hastened the next week to praise the "stream" that
eloquently flowed from the Town Pump. Men might
draw the cork and tip the decanter — "father Adam
might founder on apples" but liquor was neither boon
nor luxury in the Garden of Eden —

"When the heart like a plummet resounds in the dumps,
0 hasten to Platter & Batterall for pumps
That will draw up the ale of old Adam, and make
Your thirsty soul happy for charity's sake.
They have all appliances ever ordained
To handle elixirs, both dug-for and rained:
So here's to the pumps that will jerk up success
And splash satisfaction all over your dress."

348 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

"The way to do a thing is to do it" — and there is
another saying — ^''Do the thing and you shall have
the power/' So it was with the "Poet at the Crank."
He had been a minstrel, a sign-painter, a vagabond,
a scrub reporter, a "lawyer," a rabid reader of novels
and a clever imitator of old poets. There was danger
of his becoming Jack of all trades and master of none.
On entering the Democrat office that danger vanished.
He became "master of rhymes." With singleness of
purpose he cherished the art of making verse. He
made rhymes (no end of them the mere shavings
of the shop), rhymes of every conceivable kind
about every conceivable thing — ^made them till his task,
from the metrical side of poetry, was as easy as for
winds to blow or brooks to murmur. Having mastered
that, the next and all-commanding thing was to foster
ideas. Though he rhyme with the tongues of angels, if
he had not ideas he were a tinkling cymbal. To origi-
nate ideas was not his province — ^they were gifts — but
once he had them, he was to nourish and fondle them as
a mother the new-born child. "When I neglect that
mandate, may my tongue cleave to the roof of my
mouth."

The "Jingling Editor" especially endeared himself
to the public heart by his abounding "exercise of the
lighter attributes that go to make up a weekly." Since

"Kings sometimes unbend.
And Kings may jovial be,"

said he, "the poet likewise may let Pegasus frisk and
caper through the fall oats of wit and ridicule." It
was said that he could "coax more laughter out of an
ink bottle into the Democrat than any two papers in
the state could hold." "Why take the Danbury News

ON THE TRIPOD OF THE DEMOCRAT 349

or the Burlington Hawkeye/' wrote a subscriber
"when you can get the Democrat? The poor sigh to
read it/' The humor in his "sappy locals" made Old
Sobersides clap his thighs.

"Local ! Local ! Beware of the day
When the Democrat snatches you out of the way."

A farmer "staggered into the office yesterday and
laid a watermelon big as a barrel on our dissecting
table."

The picnic at Blacklidge Hills, with dainties spread
on the green grass "has moored itself away in a golden
port of memory, and there rides at anchor like a fairy
galleon in the harbor of our dreams."

Glancing along the table of a cheap boarding house
where "a dozen herbivorous cannibals were performing
on roast'n-ears as if they were so many French harps,"
the "Crank" was thrilled with "musical emotions a
buttonwood orchestra could not produce."

May glides onward into June; "the jnice of straw-
berries is on the market ; each is worth a watermelon ;
we have saved our money to pay off a mortgage."

Last week the new patent jail broke again — "seven
prisoners dripped out before the hole was discovered."

"Give us the log jail with two rooms interfused.
No friends but the darkness, no windows to loot,
The old-fashioned jail that our grandfathers used."

The pump on the east side of the Square that "for
weeks has suffered from a throat affection, has been
relieved and now wears a wind-pipe second to none in
the county."

The contents of the street sprinkler fell like a bless-
ing on the thirsty street. "0 papa," said a little girl,

350 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

"Her cheek against the window-pane—
'Yonder goes a man a-haulin' rain/ "

To a band of serenaders : ''Tackle the office again
and we will give you a local long as the Moral Law/'
For a band of Bulgarians, however, the "Jingling
Editor" had nothing but "a pan of hot pitch: come
again and we'll drop a harrow on you."

The weekly was humming. "Last week we counted
twenty-three articles in an Exchange which had been
taken from the Democrat without credit. We are con-
sidering the propriety of sending out advanced sheets
for clipping purposes. We printed six hundred extras
for our last issue and fondly hoped to appease the pub-
lic appetite ; but as the supply was ravenously gobbled
by Saturday noon, we made a note, and will this week
stretch our elastic capacity to its utmost tension. The
Democrat is indeed nutritious."

The "Poet at the Crank" seems to have been the
agent of prosperity. In four months the circulation
increased from four hundred to twenty-four hundred
subscribers — a fact as mysterious to him as the ma-
neuvers of the Muse. By June business round the
Public Square was "flourishing in a soil of industry
and enterprise." Townsmen and countrymen were
scrambling on the "Rhyme Wagon" ;

"On this side and on that
They grapple with success
Till smiling Fortune pets them
With her tenderest caress."

"We are assuming stately proportions," the "Crank"
wrote the Schoolmaster; "we are almost certain of
the highest journalistic success. Yours always. Jay
Whoop."
In addition to a shower of jingles for the merchantSp

ON THE TRIPOD OF THE DEMOCRAT 351

the first week of June the poet coaxed from his ink
bottle a breezy advertising column for the Democrat:

THE ANDERSON DEMOCRAT

— ^is a —

Good Little Paper

— and you —

Ought to be Kind to it I

It ain't "the best paper in the State," or if
it is, it won't acknowledge it, for it someway
feels that the market is already glutted with
that brand. No, it is simply

good!
and you ought to love it as you would a great,
fat, laughing baby with a bunch of jingling «
keys.

• i^ ••.••• •

Its editors are all so gentle and artless!
Their features are invariably wreathed in
smiles, and their noble hearts hammer away
at the blissful hours like a sheepskin band in
a Fourth o' July delegation. Everybody seems
impressed with the editors, and their amiable
disposition is a perpetual sermon for the evil-
disposed.

• •••••••

The circulation of The Democrat is as large
as any other county paper, and is increasing
with a degree of velocity tnat lifts the hat of
the oldest inhabitant.

The Democrat makes a specialty of news,
and has a knack of securing niore items of
interest than it can possibly publish. In con-
sequence, much of worth is unavoidably lost to
the public, to say nothing of the thousand
gems of purest ray serene that hide their bril-
liance in the dark, unfathomed caves of the
waste basket.

352 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

The Democrat is the farmer's friend and
never tires of telling him what he already
knows — ^throwing in occasionally some hints
of a simple device that will keep rats from
climbing up the legs of his com crib, or a
recipe that will knock hog cholera higher than
Kilgore's kite. Our recipes for botts are much
sought after, and are alone worth the price of
subscription.

• •••••••

The Democrafs market reports are alwajrs
lovely. This department is under the manage-
ment of a lightning calculator. Occasional
glimpses of the gifted gentleman may be
caught through the periphery of figures in
which he is constantly enveloped. He is the
boon companion of the grain merchant— the
confidential adviser of tiie stock buyer, and
the bosom friend of the butcher, the baker
and candlestick maker.

And lastly, The Democrat is full to the
brim of the creamiest literature of the day,
and ever replete with the soul-searing utter-
ances— ^"Hist! the blood-hounds are on me
trail" and " 'Twas but the work of a mo-
ment," and so forth, and so forth. 0, it^a
bully! And poetry! The Democrat keeps a
poet constantly on hand who writes anything
from Paradise Lost down to a candy-kiss
verse. Odes, however, seem to be his strong-
est inclination — in fact, he Ode so much when
The Dem/)C7'at employed him, that they had to
advance his first month's salary. But he's
frugal now and can wear a collar longer witii-
out turning than any other of his species in
the State.

SUBSCRIBE NOW

AND MOURN AT LEISUBJBi

ON THE TRIPOD OF THE DEMOCRAT * 353

While the Democrat was "going like everything,"
the poet wrote "Some Observations on Decoration
Day'' and printed his "Silent Victors." This and
Henry Watterson's address at Nashville, Tennessee,
the exchanges heralded as the chief 'TMemoriar' events
of the year. The printing of "poems of mark'' how-
ever was exceptional ; he was writing and saving them
"for better distinction."

The work he did on the Democrat staggers imagina-
tion. What he accomplished on the "Rhyme Wagon,"
conservative judges considered a full summer's work.
But that was secondary in quality if not in quantity.
Formerly his poetic effusions were concealed with a
few favorite books in his "reticule." When filled, its
contents were transferred to a "telescope." Now he
dignified his room with a trunk. Verily that trunk
was the "Chinese Casket," save that its contents did
not consist solely of the best that he wrote. Its con-
fusion and disorder were beyond belief. It contained
everything he wrote — ^jingle, normal English, doggerel
and dialect ; pathos and humor, both prose and verse ;
and show-bills and letters, and trinkets innumerable —
all locked away in its musty confines, to drift perilously
about, in the years to come, from hotel to hotel, from
attics to job printing rooms and dark basements as the
Fates decreed. No Chinese princess guarded the "Cas-
ket" while Riley wrote for it — unless she did it art-
fully in the guise of one of his numerous superstitions :
namely that *'he should destroy nothing he wroteJ* In
moments of inspiration he was aware of some force
other than his own guiding his pen. It was not for
him in those seasons of rapture to determine values.
Save all, and let the public judge.

The trunk contained the Golden Fleece of the seven-

354 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

ties, original manuscripts of verse that a decade later
first saw the light in book form in Neghboriy Poems,
Afterwhiles, and Rhymes of Childhood, Like the
Koran, portions of those books "were written in frac^
tions and flung pellmell into a caskef

While on the staff of the Democrat, Riley's room —
"No. 19— North Main Streel^Up Stair&— In the Rear"
— like its successors in Greenfield and Indianapolis
was little more than a repository for what he wrote.
It was his second "literary den." Callers commented
on its vacant appearance, the meager supply of furni-
ture, and the absence of pictures on the wall. He was
the "Crank" in the daytime and usually wrote his
jingle in the Democrat office — ^the front room on the
same floor. At night he was the poet, and when sere-
naders came they had to tackle tiie silence under the
window in the rear.

Here in his second 'literary den" notable contribu-
tions to Child Literature had their origin. Here the
real child received "a just hearing in the world of
letters." Among the first of the child poems to appear
in the De^nocrat was "Willie" — ^not a pretentious
poem, perhaps not intended by its author as a poem
at all. But it contained enough merit to be revamped
for the first child book (Rhymes of Childhood),
in which it was entitled "Prior to Miss Belle's
Appearance," and when the poet with such magical
effect began to breathe the innocence of childhood
across the footlights, "Willie" was given the last place
on the program and for a long time retained that
distinction in his public readings. "That child-sketch,"
said his comrade Nye, "makes him the best entertainer
in the universe."

In July the "vexations" began and by the end of

ON THE TRIPOD OP THE DEMOCRAT 855

August were hatching in such swarms that it took a
lightning calculator to keep a record of them. Occa-
sionally an exchange struck the "Crank" between the
eyes with a pellet like this : "The Anderson Democrat
complains that its neighbors are stealing its original
poetry. The man who would steal Riley's poetry (in
the language of General Dix) should be shot on the
spot."

"Complying with the request of numerous citizens,"
the "Jingling Editor," accompanied by his genial
friend, William M. Croan of the Democrat, visited the
Poor Farm "for the purpose of determining the real
condition of the institution that had so long been the
subject of unfavorable comment." What the "Crank"
said in his editorial, headed in "Over the Hills
to the Poor House," was "in utter disregard of all
affectation and in strict adherence to facts. That the
County of Madison should pay out seven thousand
dollars a year to support an institution in such degrad-
ing style was a blot on her escutcheon years could not
erase."

The indictment brought the Poor Farm overseer to
town with a "gun" in his pocket. He met the "Crank"
at the foot of the stairs, who,

"Quaking like an aspen leaf
Referred him to his journal Chief."

Fortunately the chief editor was "somewhere down the
street." When the overseer found him the sign in the
zodiac was unfavorable for shooting and he returned
to the Farm to let the sun set on his wrath. Mean-
time the "Crank," like a thief in the night, had fled
through an alley to the White River thickets, there to
remain till Old Granny Dusk —

S56 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

**With her cluckety shoes, and her old black gown
Came to pilot his shadow back into town."

The anti-liquor "Crusaders" began to buzz about
the "Jingling Editor" soon after the jolly Muse sang
the praise of wine, though the production that gave
particular offense was a burlesque on baseball. They
saw more in it than the ridicule of a popular game.
It was a libel on their favorite Temperance advocate,
Luther Benson, whose arraignment of drink was as
unforgetable as it was eloquent. From **the green
and holy morning of life" he had one long struggle
with the demon Rum. A specimen of his eloquence
throws light on his friend's "imitation" : "In winning
men from evil," says Benson, in one of his brilliant
periods, "send me to the blasphemer of the holy Mas*
ter's name ; send me to the forger, who for long years
of cunning has defrauded his fellowmen; send me to
the murderer, who lies in the shadow of the gallows,
with red hands dripping with the blood of innocence ;
but send me not to the lost human shape whose spirit is
on fire, and whose flesh is steaming and burning with
the flames of hell. And why? Because his will is en-
thralled in the direst bondage conceivable — ^his man-
hood is in the dust, and a demon sits in the chariot of
his soul, lashing the fiery steeds of passion to maniacal
madness."

Now the fact is that no son of misfortune was
more fully aware of the truth in Benson's words than
Riley. He, too, was in bondage ; he, too, was fighting
a good fight. The last thing in the world he would
have done would have been to give offense to a man
"whose passion for liquor could slumber for weeks
and then manifest itself with the force of a hurricane."

As has been seen, Riley was a clever imitator, and

ON THE TRIPOD OF THE DEMOCRAT 357

he only intended, in his "imitation" of Benson, to
praise the orator's eloquence. But participants in the
"Murphy Movement" would not have it so — and,
strange to say, there was a buzz of criticism among
baseball zealots, too. The flaming caption in the
Democrat, "BENSON OUT-BENSONED" with such
sub-heads as "baseball catcher hopelessly insane"

and "STRANGE HALLUCINATION OP A MADMAN" Were to

say the least unfortunate.

"Are you going to fill an umpire's grave or are
you going to quit and be a man?" Baseball fans did
not like it.

With implied apologies to Benson his clever imitator
poured a stream of eloquence through the lips of "a most
remarkable specimen of lunacy, Tod Geary, the famous
baseball catcher, who it will be remembered has, since
May, been suffering mentally from an injury received
on the head by the careless batting of Cy Thatcher."
The way Geary "poured forth the stream" was rather
dramatic. Taking his position, according to Riley, on
a little square zinc that was tacked on the uncarpeted
floor of the asylum, and unbuttoning his collar, and
rolling up his sleeves, his "startling invective" (in
part) fell on the ear as follows :

"Talk to me of whisky!" he exclaimed; "Why, I
tell you, men, if every crazy, crawling, writhing, hiss-
ing serpent of the curse were let loose upon me now, I
could take them to my bosom here, and fondle them and
pet them and love them like so many rosy babies, if
it would for one minute free me from the bloody fangs
of the inflaming passion for Baseball.

"Away far back along the dusky shadows of the
past, as far away as History, the eagle-eyed, can fathom
with her far-reaching vision, we find the charred and

858 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

blackened symbols of the game of sport, that in old
Babylonish days coaxed lazy laughter from the lips of
kings, and tickled royal ribs with senseless mirth. The
curse of this debasing appetite in man has been pam-
pered, fed and fostered for so long, that to-day, two
thousand millions of human beings are bound in loath-
some bondage with the rustless chains of habit, and
fettered and fastened down forever to a vice as hope-
lessly damnable as that which first brought sin and
death into the world, and locked with relentless bars of
fate the gilded gates of Paradise.

''No, I tell you, Baseball is a snare and a delusion.
To-day the whole wide world writhes and blisters under
the incandescent fury of this fiery element condensed
and focused into a white-heat of passion that would
hiss and boil and bubble over a slack tub of morality
as wide and deep as the Atlantic Ocean." (A ralung
fire for the fans.)

While lesser vexations were exchanging shots with
the "Perspiring Poet," a more violent tempest was
brewing. The baseball episode and the "hip pocket
gun" were breezes in comparison with the storm that
rose out of the unknown when the spirit of "the late
lamented Poe" began to walk abroad. Since that was
a blast of huge proportions, it is reserved for a chap-
ter of its own. It was the sky-rocket that brought the
"exercises" on the Democrat to a dose.

CHAPTER XVn

THE LITERARY TORPEDO

THE "Jingling Editor*' of tho Democrat was wont
to strain what usage terms poetic license. He
did so in that racy sample of metrical porridge,
"Thanksgiving Day at Henchley's." Gleefully ran the
metrical stream: —

"And this is how it happened some discrepancies befell
At the late midsummer meeting in front of the hotel,
Where, it seems, the folks assembled were concurring

more to be
In keeping with contention than the laws of harmony.

"For there among the number were two rivals of the
press,

Who had photographed each other with prolonged ma-
liciousness ;

Who in their respective columns had a thousand words
to spare

For the other fellow just across the county Public
Square.

"And cheek by jowl together were two members of the
bar.
Politically, legally, and socially at war.
Who denounced each other daily, and in every local

phrase
That could make the matter binding all the balance
of their days.

359

860 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

"And an ordinary actor, and an artist of renown,
\^ose cue, it seemed, for smiling was the little actor's

frown;
And the most loquacious author my remembrance can

recall.
And a little bench-leg poet that couldn't talk at all/'

Riley fancied the notable occasion as at some little
town on the "Bee Line." The little town was the big
town of Anderson* The originals of the characters
had participated in a series of discussions, serious and
otherwise, which culminated in a whirlwind of criti-
cism, the "shadowy disaster*' (to borrow his friend
Nye's figurative words) "wherein the 'Jingling Edi-
tor's' feelings gave way beneath his feet and his heart
broke with a loud report."

The "bench-leg poet" was the "Poet at the Crank" ;
the "loquacious author," an average chap about town
with ambitions a trifle higher than the mediocrity of
his performance. The "artist of renown" was the in-
dustrious Samuel Richards, the Artist Clomrade, who
from week to week illustrated the jingling verse on the
Democrat. His paintings caught the attention of John
Ruskin. His "Evangeline," now in possession of the
Detroit Art Museum, was exhibited in many cities.
The "little actor" was "the twittering pilgrim from
Oshkosh,^ the Graphic Chum, who, after discovering
the "Golden Girl" and wandering under moonless heav-
ens with a "Rip Van Winkle Company," had returned to
Anderson to enter a law office. Of the "two members of
the bar," one was the late Captain W. R. Myers, who
served his country as a soldier, and his commonwealth
as secretary of state. He could spin a good story. He
was not a stranger to eloquence. His voice was the
envy of all who heard him, the eminent author of Ben-

THE LITERARY TORPEDO 361

Hur once remarking that he "would consider his for-
tune made if he possessed it." The "two rivals of the
press" were, first, William M. Croan, the life-long
friend to whom credit is due for Riley's employment on
the Democrat; and, second, William Kinnard, the editor
of the rival paper, the Anderson Herald. He was a
young man of literary taste, had a subtle sense of
humor ; and he could strike hard when he thought the
offense demanded it.

"Sing Ho ! for the Herald, that popular sheet !
The friend of the honest, the foe of the 'beat,'
The pride of the good, the dread of the Tiard/ — ■
The dissonant ring of metallic Kinnard."

There were also, on occasion, "two disciples from the
medical fraternity" and, now and then, a "thankful
pastor." The bone of contention was the recognition
of young writers. The club usually met at Richards'
Gallery, or the Democrat office — and rarely under the
trees in the Court House yard. At the time "some dis-
crepancies befell," there was a full attendance seated in
the chairs near the sidewalk in front of the hotel, where
the temperature of the night blended fervently with
the heat of contention.

"0 Stilwell House ! Thou royal palace hall
Whose arching doorway and inviting stair,
To all who cast a happy anchor there.
Is gracious boon and benison — ^We fall
Upon our knees in thanks for all
The culinary dainties of thy fare"—

but most of all we thank thee for the nervous hush-
fighting that preceded the great newspaper war known
to literature as the 'T.eonainie Controversy."
"Quit pushing your pencil and go to painting signs,"

862 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

said the rival editor, prodding the poet on his failure
to receive eastern recognition.

"I am not accepted by the magazines because I have
no reputation," returned the poet.

"You are not accepted because you do not write
poetry the people want to read !"

"No," continued the poet, focusing the fire of his eye
on his rival, "I tell you, all that is required to make a
poem successful and popular is to prove its autiior a
genius known to fame."

"The plausible opinion of a young writer," said the
Captain, giving the editor a lift ; "you are wrong ; merit,
not the name, makes a poem pass muster. Without
name or credit, it travels like a gold piece on its in-
trinsic worth, as valuable in New England as in Indi-
ana. Taddle Your Own Canoe' has been sung thread-
bare, and yet not one in a thousand knows its author
is an Indiana woman. Who cares for the mint, so the
jingle is genuine. Take the John Brown battle song—
his soul goes marching on — ^the impetuous music that
swept over battlefields in a night ; did that kindle with-
in the heart of armies the swift desire for action be-
cause its author bore an illustrious name? Or take the
popular 'Bain on the Roof — ?

'Listen to the sweet refrain
That is played upon the shingles
By the patter of the rain/ —

Was the author of that known to fame ? Did he have
to wait for the stamp of magazine approval before his
poem received public recognition? Who is the author?
Nobody knows."

"Coates Kinney," answered the poet.

"Well, nobody cares."

THE LITERARY TORPEDO 863

"I care V

"There is the poem," pursued the Captain sagely;
"it sang itself straight into the public heart"

"Not straight," returned the poet ; "it had to take the
jog-trot route via the weeklies. Had the signature
been Longfellow instead of Kinney, the poem would
have flown on the wings of the wind."

"The wisdom of Nestor !" exclaimed the loquacious
author, approvingly.

"You mean Tom Noddy !" retorted the editor.
"A few years ago," continued the poet, diverting
thought from the editor's rebuff, "Robert Bonner of
the New York Ledger paid Henry Ward Beecher
twenty-five thousand dollars for Norwood — ^that fabu-
lous sum simply for a name. Had some anonymous
author submitted the manuscript, the first five pages
would have consigned it to the waste basket."

"And the same Robert Bonner," added the artist,
rallying to the aid of the poet, "paid Longfellow three
thousand dollars for the 'Hanging of the Crane.' Had
the author been unknown he would not have paid thirty
dollars for it."

"It would have been declined," said the poet.

"Who reads the 'Hanging of the Crane' ?" asked the
actor, derisively.

1 do," answered the Captain.

Tlapdoodle!" snapped the little actor, who, a loyal
employee in the law office, was nevertheless that par-
ticular night the Captain's antagonist.

"An empty shell," added the loquacious author, but
whether he meant the Captain or the poem was not ex-
actly clear.

"Beg your pardon, gentlemen,'* said the tranquil
Captain ; "you fly the mark. At heart, the truth is this :

364 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

the merit of a poem wins, whether its author be Long-
fellow or Kinney, known or unknown. Permit me to
quote a line from a poem some of you, perhaps, have
read. Its author sees the azure eyes of children,
dreamy and

" Tiimpid as planets that emerge
Above the ocean's rounded verge,
Soft shining through the summer night.'

Do you say that has no merit? Do you call that flap-
doodle?"

"Heaven forbid!" interrupted the artist.

"Beautiful I" returned the actor.

"The gentleman is quite safe in that opinion/' said
the Captain; "it is beautiful. He will find it in the
'Hanging of the Crane,' " — on which a titter of con-
fusion went round the circle at the little actor's ex-
pense.

"You gentlemen claim," continued the Captain,
warming up to the subject, "that a young writer does
not receive the recognition he deserves. I claim he
does. Nothing can keep talent down. The real
trouble with the literature of to-day is that the stand-
ard of criticism is not more severe. The way to liter-
ary celebrity is made easy and smooth, not narrow and
hard as in the days of the Scottish Reviewers — the
result being this, that Father Time has to kill off car-
goes of imitators and pretenders that never should
have been permitted to afHict the public."

"We are wandering," said the poet. "Hear me : I
tell you the trade-mark does influence the public, though
the thing sold may be as juiceless and insipid as a
sucked lemon. A poem over the signature of Bryant,
Whittier or Tennyson has the preference though it may

THE LITERARY TORPEDO 865

be inferior to 'The Rain on the Roof/ and a thousand
other gems that fail to receive the golden opinion of
the magazines. Established houses in the world of
business have preference with the people. Reputation
goes as far in literature as in commerce."

"Yes," broke in the artist, emphatically, "and poems
have been lauded to the skies in the heyday of a poet's
fame that fell dead from the press when he was in
obscurity."

"Why," continued the artist, "does the publisher call
to eminent authors for more when there is no more?
When a well is pumped empty it would seem to accord
with common sense to go where there is water — afresh
water, if you please, gushing from a hitherto unknown
spring. Hundreds of productions are flaunted daily in
our faces because celebrated authors wrote them, copied
and reproduced by the press till the market is choked
with literary rubbish."

"Unfit for the scrap-heap," interrupted the actor,
swinging merrily from one side of the question to
the other. "The stuff ought to be bucked and gagged,
and rolled up like a ball of stale popcorn and thrown
out of the car window."

"At which unhappy juncture came a journalistic gust.
Which the rival designated as a most atrocious thrust."

"Where is the Red-eyed Law?" shrieked the loqua-
cious author.

"And the Grand Jury?" added the actor. ''Con-
spiracy!" the editor cries. On which the actor asks,
"Who says so?" "Anybody! — ^I say so!" cries the
editor. To which the artist adds sarcastically, "Oh,
indeed!" Followed by the actor's blunt retort, "Yes,

866 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

indeed!" And then — ^to give figurative meaning to
the lines —

''There was a shadowy remembrance of a group of

three or four
Who were seemingly dissecting another on the floor."

By which time the sidewalk and the hotel lobby were in
such a combustible state that it took an adjournment
and the remainder of the night to cool things down.

Such in substance (with a little spice from Dickens)
is an epitome of the contention that gave birth
to that curiosity known to literary history as the
"Poe Poem" — ^the clash of words, so to speak, that
preceded Riley's resolution to test his dictum, that
a poem to be successful and popular must have as its
author a genius known to fame. Things were happen-
ing to justify his position. The graceful poem, "A
Country Pathway/' had recently been returned to its
author a second time. Already Myron Reed was send-
ing a Riley poem to a New York magazine. Once a
year for six years the magazine declined the poem. Its
author was unknown. The seventh year it was ac-
cepted. Riley had then published his first book; he
was at the door of an auspicious future.

The Poe-Poem venture was an innocent collusion
with deception. It never entered Rilejr's head
to prolong the deceit. As soon as he had won
his point, he would explain all to the satisfac-
tion of all. "I wanted," said he, "to chuck the
poem in the face of my opponents as proof of my
position." When older he usually evaded the subject
but, if pressed for comment, was sometimes reminded
of an innocent pioneer farmer, who had been haled be-
fore a country squire for larceny. '1 was arrested for

THE LITERARY TORPEDO 367

stealin' shoats/' said the f amer, ''and the wust of it wuz,
the prosecution come dam near provin' it." Riley was
innocent of any desire to deceive the public perma-
nently, "but the critics/' said he, "came dam near prov-
ing me a crafty Pecksniff."

Riley was not the first in that hapless field. Authors
before him had feigned the literary style of
other writers. One hundred years before, Thomas
Chatterton had published certain poems, which he
claimed had been written by a monk in the fifteenth
century. Riley celebrated the centenary of the event
by a little counterfeit of his own. William Ireland, a
London author, as told in his Confessions, had pro-
duced a tragedy, purported to have been written by
Shakespeare, which drew a crowded house at Drury
Lane, Kemble playing the principal part.

Nor was it Riley's first offense. He had been a party
to jolly stratagems from his youth. In his school-days,
as editor of the Criterion, he connived with the editor
of the Amendment, the rival school paper, and wrote
editorials for it in abuse of himself and the
Criterion — "the badly bruised and shattered Criterion
is now sinking lower and lower in the corrosive scale
of self-esteem," and so forth. As the reader has seen,
he was party to a big-sign ruse when his crafty confed-
erate while painting the bridge at Anderson, fell from
the ladder into the river.

Having decided on the literary ruse, the first thing
was the choice of an author. One of Rejmolds' pleasant
delusions was the fancy that the divinity of Michael
Angelo inspired him in his productions — ^"he was ever
calling on his name — invoking him by his works."
Similar delusions haunted Riley's fancy; indeed, had
been a source of diversion ever since be had read the

368 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

"British Books." When he wrote a "clever imitation''
he invoked the influence of the author he was attempt-
ing to reflect "Looking over the list of the dead poets/'
said Riley, "I selected Poe because I thought he would
enjoy the joke. He had been a little in the hoaxing
line himself — ^his 'Balloon Hoax' for instance— and
would not care if I took some liberty with his name/'

A second reason for choosing Poe for the ruse was
Riley's fellow-feeling for the author and his style. He
liked Poe's insistence upon "an even, metrical flow in
versification." He thought of him as "one looking from
an eminence rather than from the ordinary level of
humanity." There was something — ^he had not experi-
enced it to Poe's pitch of frenzy — something by which
he more fully comprehended the true proportions of
"that marred and broken individuality, that nature so
sensitively organized and so rarely developed, under
circumstances exceptionally perilous and perverting."
He sympathized with Poe's hopeless despair.

The "Jingling Editor" was interested in the fact that
"The Bells" had been composed and finished in the year
of his birth. While '^grinding business to an edge," lie
had had a little fun, at Poe's expense, with some dry
goods merchants, the Bell Brothers. (Doubtless Poe
did not enjoy the joke, but the "Crank" was not con-
sidering that phase of it then.)

HAPPY BELLS !

What a list of rare inducements their advertising tells I

How they dance adown the gamut

To the lowest of the less.

And crowd it on and ram it

Through the gangway to success 1

And unrivaled in low prices,

THE LITERARY TORPEDO 369

How they lift and loom alone

Far above the low devices

And the tricks the trade has known ;

And even mounting higher

Up the ringing rounds of fame.

How they lift the eager buyer

To an altitude the same.

Till the customers transported

With the glory they have courted,

Throw their happy-haunted hats

To the bats — ^bats— bats

And hop and whoop and howl

And prance around and yowl

Till they drive the chorus crazy with their suicidal yellft

To the tintinnabulations of the Bells! Bells! Bells!

Choosing an author for the ruse was one thing, writ-
ing a poem for it a different and more difficult thing. It
was "writing to order," a thing that RUey seldom suc-
cessfully did. It was a mad venture.

In April, soon after his arrival in Anderson, he had
written "Orlie Wilde." He thought of that "fanciful
fishermaid."

.... "He saw her fly

In reckless haste adown a crag,
Her hair a-flutter like a flag
Of gold that danced across the strand
In little mists of silver sand."

The marine myth however scarcely met the require-
ments. It was Poe-ish, in a way, Poe-ish in theme, but
he could not make it Poe-ish in poetic structure. After
wrestling with the poem several nights in the Democrat
office, Riley spent a night at the home of his Graphic
Chum, the old boarding house on Bolivar Street, where-
in originated "The Object Lesson" and other bantlings
of his Graphic days. "On that solenm summer night"
(Saturday, July 7, 1877) "I could not sleep," said he.

370 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

"I fancied a man idly waUdng about in fhe aarkneas
waiting for the birth of his child — ^then the birth and
the murmur of something from the Heavennsent
visitor, followed by the father's interpretation of the
murmur as a message to him. While my chum snored
away in peace, I rose, seating myself in my bed-gown
by a window. I made a rough draft of the poem that
had been floating like nebula in the chaos of my
thought. From the sky over Anderson there came the
idea to make the 'little lisper' float away as a dream on
the wings of night/' He entitled the poem ''Leonainie''
and made few changes in the first draft

''Leonainie — Angels named her ;
And they took the light
Of the laughing stars and framed her
In a smile of white."

In this Poe mystery there was more than appeared
on the face of it. ^'Leonainie" was not only mysterious
to the public but to its author as well.

"How I found it, caught it, or came by it,
What stuff 'tis made of, whereof it is bom, I am to
learn."

A rival editor, quoting a Riley remark, said it was
a "poetical fungus which sprang from the decay of high
thoughts."

That it was phrased in the morbid, fantastic vein,
characteristic of Poe, impartial judges conceded
from the first. That the poem had defects was also
conceded. "The measure is faulty," said its author,
"and there are faulty lines in it — there purposely to
chafe the intolerable conceit of the critics, for ^xi^mple^

Heaven's glory seemed adorning
Earth with its esteem."

THE LITERARY TORPEDO 371

''If Poe wrote that/' said a Cincinnati critic after
''Leonainie" was printed, ''it was when he was in pina-
fores/' Other critics made similar conmients, one ob-
serving that "esteem ruined 'Leonainie/ It is a fatal
word in every poem where it is made to rhyme." Mean-
while the author chuckled to himself as did the author
of the "Raven" when he confused the critics of Boston.

"Leonainie" contained one line that covered a multi-
tude of literary sins ; that the critics could not decry.
A host of readers saw imperishable beauly in "God
smiled and it was morning." Many hazarded the
prophecy that that line would live with such immortal
verse as "God is sifting out the hearts of men before
His judgment seat/' or "The paths of glory lead but
to the grave/'

Although . "Leonainie" was practically finished, the
venture was still in doubt. One day the poet was for
ity another day against it.

But his ambition called to him. If his verae had
merit, it should have recognition. He would take the
risk:

**I have set my life upon the cast,
And I will stand the hazard of the die/'

Meantime he was considering a vehicle for the ruse.
To print it in the Democrat, where there had already
appeared a surplus of curiosities, meant that the pub-
lic would immediately declare the poem a fake. A few
days prior, the editor of the Kokomjo Dispatch, John 0.
Henderson "had fretted himself to the verge of insan-
ity," according to an exchange, in a mad endeavor to
decipher the incomprehensible jingle in "Craque-
odoom," whose tattoo on the roof of the dusk, the Artist
Chum made more abstruse by a spectral illustration

872 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

repFesenting the crankadox, a ghoulish reptile with a
mammoth fin and a loop in its tail, standing with one
foot on the horn of the moon.

'The quavering shriek of the fly-up-the-creek
Was fitfully wafted afar

To the queen of the Wunks as she powdered her cheek
With the pulverized rays of a star/'

''What does it mean ?" asked Henderson, commenting
in the Dispatch on "the gifted" J. W. Riley. "It is the
most weird piece of poetic thought we have ever read.
It reads like an effusion of some poetic genius of the
fable age in which Mother Goose wrote her melodies/'
The comment pleased the "Jingling Poet'' inmiensely,
and he promptly thanked the editor for "the first,
friendly hand extended him in that period of impene-
trable gloom/' The result was the choice of the Ko^
komo Dispatch for the ruse — and the following letter
breaking the news to the editor :

OFFICE OF THE ANDERSON DEMOCRAT

Todisman & Groan, Proprietors

Anderson, Indiana, July 23, 1877.
Editor Dispatch — Dear Sir :

I write to ask a rather curious favor of you. The
dull times worry me, and I yearn for something to stir
things from their comatose condition. Trusting to find
you of like inclination, I ask your confidence and as-
sistance.

This idea has been haunting me : — ^I will prepare a
poem — carefully imitating the style of some popular
American poet, deceased, and you may **gtve
it to the world for the first time'* through the
columns of your paper, prefacing it in some ingenious
manner, with the assertion that the original manur
script was found in the album of an old lady living
in your town — and in the handwriting of the poet

THE LITERARY TORPEDO 873

imitated — ^together with signature, etc., etc. — you
can fix the story — only be sure to clinch it so as to
defy the scrutiny of the most critical lens. If
we succeed, and I think sheer audacity sufficient
capital to assure that end, — after "working up" the
folks, and smiling over the encomiums of the Press,
don't you know ; we will then "rise up William Riley,"
and bu'st our literary balloon before a bewildered and
enlightened world ! ! !

I write you this in all earnestness and confidence,
trusting you will favor the project with your valuable
assistance. It will be obvious to you why I do not use
our paper here. Should you fall in with the plan, write
me at once, and I will prepare and send the poem in
time for your issue of this week. Hoping for an early
and favorable response, I am

Very truly yours,
J. W. Riley.

Had the letter dropped from a balloon the Dispatch
had not been more surprised. Its editor, an energetic,
enthusiastic young man, was about Rilejr's age. He
appreciated good literature, and particularly the poetic
gifts of his new friend, so his prompt answer was to be
expected:—

THE DISPATCH

Kokomo, Indiana, July 23, 1877.
J. W. Riley,
My Dear Sir:

Your favor of this date is just received. Your idea
is a capital one and is cunningly conceived. I assure
you that I "tumble" to it with eagerness. You arc
doubtless aware that newspaper men, as a rule, would
rather sacrifice honor, liberty, or life itself, than to
deviate from the paths of truth — but the idea of getting
in a juicy "scoop" upon the rural exchanges, causes me
to hesitate, consider, yea, consent to this little act of
journalistic deception. Yes, my dear Riley, I am with
you boots and soul. But hadn't I better forestall the

374 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

poem by a ''startling announcement or something of
the sort one week before its publication? The public
would then be on the tiptoe of expectancy and so forth.
I merely offer this as a suggestion. We would be hardly
able to publish the poem, if of any length, this week.
Copy is well in for Thursday's issue now, save local
paragraphs. Send copy as soon as you can and we can
print next week. If you like, you may also write the
preface as you have indicated. Perhaps you could do
it better than I. I enclose this letter in a plain envelope
to disarm suspicion. Let me hear from you.

Fraternally,

J. 0. Hendebson.

Mum's the word.

For a fortnight events happened rapidly. *' July
twenty-seventh, the editor acknowledged receipt of
the poem with suggestions for its publication. ''It is
really Poe-etical," he wrote, "a matchlessly conceived
poem. It certainly would not detract from Foe's genius
to father the fugitive. I assure you it is withal a
marvelous and rare creation, honoring you and the
State as well. Have not yet matured my story, but will
have it in due time."

Riley's mind did indeed brim with ^'startling an-
nouncements," but scarcely had he prepared one when
he weakened and tried another. The thought of after-
claps took the granite out of his courage. At the last
he asked the Kokomo editor to "weave the fabric in his
own loom. Select the most feasible plan," he added,
"and nip it at once; were I to prepare the story, the
trick might be betrayed in some peculiarity of compo-
sition."

He first thought of an old washerwoman, who should
have an old album or an old book of some kind from
which a blank leaf could be torn. Then he remembered

THE LITERARY TORPEDO 375

that an old woman could not keep a secret. When in-
terviewed by the curious she was likely to speak out at
the wrong time and let the ruse down prematurely. To
avert this danger he suggested an old wood-sawyer. If
the old chap did not have an old book, the editor was
to get one, and when the curious called to see it, as they
most certainly would, they were to be told that it had
been sent to W. D. Howells of the Atlantic, or some
other eminent critic, for inspection.

But the most ''startling announcement" df all was
this: — ^In a dark comer of a walnut woods, some-
where in the neighborhood of Cornstalk Post Office,
on Wild Cat Creek, Howard County, obscured by
the rocks of the Devonian Age, the editor of the Dis-
patoh was to find a cave in the side of a hill. (It has
been remarked there is not a hill in the county big
enough for a prairie dog; there is, however.) The edi-
tor while out hunting was to get lost in a terrific storm
and grope his way through the dismal darkness to a
faint light in the cave, where he was to find a hunch-
backed dwarf, who grudgingly was to give him shelter
from the storm. While the hermit prepared a meal
over a bed of coals on the rocky fioor, the editor was
to find an old book on a rickety table, and turning
through it was to espy on a fiy leaf the lines in manu-
script of an old poem signed E. A. P. The hermit, very
uncommunicative at first, was at last to inform the edi-
tor the book had been brought from Virginia.

A very spectacular tale, but not at all plausible, in the
opinion of the editor. He was to be the hero and go
out hunting — ^he ''had never handled a gun in his life."
He was to get lost in a storm in his own counly, and
take refuge in a hermit's den — another impossible
thing. The editor promptly rejected the scheme as

376 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

"a dead give-away of the plot,'' and instead took into
his confidence a meat merchant of Kokomo. Having
eliminated the impossible plans, they determined on
the following story, which was printed with the poem
in the Dispatch, August 2, 1877:

Posthumous Poetry

A Hitherto Unpublished Poem of the Lamented Edgar

Allan Poe— Written on the Fly Leaf of an Old

Book Now in Possession of a Gentleman of

This City.

The following beautiful posthumous poem from the
gifted pen of the erratic poet, Edgar Allan Poe, we be-
lieve has never before been published in any form,
either in any published collection of Poe's now extant,
or in any magazine or newspaper of any description ;
and until the critics shall show conclusively to the con-
trary, The Dispatch shall claim the honor of giving it
to the world.

That the poem has never before been published, and
that it is a genuine production of the poet whom we
claim to be its author, we are satisfied from the circum-
stances under which it came into our possession, afttf
a thorough investigation. Calling at the house of a
gentleman of this city the other day, on a business
errand, our attention was called to a poem written on
the blank fly leaf of an old book. Handing us the book
he observed that it (the poem) might be good enough
to publish, and that if we thought so, to take it along.
Noticing the initials, E. A. P., at the bottom of the
poem, it struck us that possibly we had run across a
^'bonanza,'' so to speak, and after reading it, we acdced
who its author was, when he related the following bit
of interesting reminiscence : He said he did not know
who the author was, only that he was a young man,
that is, he was a young man when he wrote the lines
referred to. He had never seen him himself, but heard
his grandfather, who gave him the book containing the

THE LITERARY TORPEDO 877

verses, tell of the circumstances and the occasion by
which he, the grandfather, came into possession of the
book. His grandparents kept a country hotel, a sort of
a wayside inn, in a small village called Chesterfield,
near Richmond, Va. One night, just before bedtime, a
young man, who showed plainly the marks of dissipa-
tion, rapped at the door and asked if he could stay all
night, and was shown to a room. When they went to
his room the next morning to call him to breakfast, he
had gone away and left the book, on the fly leaf of
which he had written the lines given below.

Further than this our informant knew nothing, and
being an uneducated, illiterate man, it was quite nat-
ural that he should allow the great literary treasure to
go for so many years unpublished.

That the above statement is true, and our discovery
no canard, we will take pleasure in satisfying anyone
who cares to investigate the matter. The poem is writ-
ten in Roman characters, and is almost as legible as
print itself, although somewhat faded by the lapse of
time. Another peculiarity in the manuscript which we
notice is that it contains not the least erasure or a
single interlineated word. We give the poem ("Leo-
nainie") verbatim — just as it appears in the original.

Nearly a score of years later the poet included the
poem in his volume, Armazindy.

"Dear, dear Henderson — ^and I have a notion to call
you darling" wrote Riley on reading the Dispatch.
*'The *Leonainie' introductory is superb. As for the
leading paragraph, a neater, sweeter lie was never ut-
tered. I fancy Poe himself leans tiptoe over the walls
of Paradise and perks an eager ear to listen and be-
lieve.'' Again he cautioned the Dispatch to guard 'the
imposition with jealous care. Liet no one know it—
not even your mother-irirlaw, if you possess so near and
dear a relative. I shake your hand in silence and in
tears. In the language of Artemus Ward — 'I am here
* — ^I think so — ^Even of those.' "

878 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

All the Dispatch had to do was to smile inwardly,
with "a lack-lustre, dead blue eye/' and await the un-
folding of a curious future. Have faith in the '^orphan
venture/' Await developments. Eventually the
'^euchred public would not only forgive, but render
homage/'

''Mum was the word" at Anderson. The author of
"Leonainie'' did not chalk things on the walls, nor cry
them on the streets. He was a sort of Mr. Tulkinghom,
the ''Sphinx/' knowing all sorts of things and never
telling them. July twenty-fifth, he admitted to the
"circle of secrecy" Mrs. D. M. Jordan of the Richmond
Independent — "that charming child of song whose
melody ripples round a happy world." And he did
wisely. Throughout the gloom then gathering just
beyond the horizon, she was his steadfast champion.
Her pen, as well as her eyes, was capable of great
expression.

Good Friend (Riley wrote) : I write — ^not in answer
to your letter, for I haven't time to do that justice
now — ^but to ask of you a very special favor.

I have made arrangements with the editor of the
Kokomo Dispatch that he shall publish the poem "Leon-
ainie," under the guise of its being the work of Poe
himself. He, Henderson, is to invent an ingenious
story of how the original manuscript came into his pos-
session, and when it appears with a hurrah from the
Dispatch I shall copy and comment upon it in the Demo-
crat— in a way that will show that I have no complicity^
and I want you to review it, if you will, favorably, in
the Independent — ^I don't want you to really admire it
^-'but I do want you to pretend to, and eulogize over it
at rapturous length, and as though you were assured
it was in reality the work of Poe himself — as the Dw-
patch will claim. Our object is to work up the "Press"
broadcast if possible, and then to unsack tiie f elin^ and

THE LITERARY TORPEDO 879

let the "secret laughter that tickles all the soul" erupt
volcanically. The "Ring*' around the literary torpedo
as it now lies includes but four persons, including your-
self, and it must be the unwavering resolve of every
member to hold the secret safely fastened in the bosom
quartette till time shall have ripened the deception, and
the slow match has reached the touch-hole of success.

Now will you do this for me? Write at once, for I
shall not be thoroughly happy till the answer which I
believe, in your great kinchiess, you will give, reaches
me.

How are you, anyway? Happy, I trust, as am I to
sign myself

Your friend,

J. W. Riley.

The original "ring around the torpedo" (persons to
be intrusted with the secret) included thirteen names.
Riley discovering the unlucky number, reduced it, but
the sequel shows he failed to eliminate the right man.

Immediately on printing and distributing the
"Leonainie" issue, the Dispatch editor reprinted
the poem with a notice calling attention to
it on small slips of paper which he mailed to
newspapers and magazines (including Scribner's,
Harper's, and the Atlantic) with request that they
print the poem and give credit to the Dispatch. He
added that the old book containing the manuscript was
in his possession, and further that he would give ex-
perts in chirography the privilege of examining it.
That was the clever stroke that "excited the comment
of the newspaper world." "Leonainie" would not have
gone "the rounds of the press like wildfire," had the
enterprising editor not mailed the slips to "every State
in the Union."

The second day after publication came an inquiry
from the "Sphinx" at Anderson:

80 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

Editor Dispatch,
Dear Sir —

Some literary thug has gobbled our Dispatch contain-
ing your Poe discovery. Please send me two or three
extra copies. What does it mean? Are you in ear-
nest? I would like to enter into a correspondence with
you regarding it, for even though you be the victim of
a deception I would be proud to know your real author.
Do I understand from your description that the manu-
script is written like printed letters? Write me full
particulars and I will serve you in response in any way
in my power.

yery truly,

J. W. Rn^EY.

The ''Sphinx" might be garrulous and propose rid-
dles outside the "circle of secrecy" — bvi never a ward
within it At first he was content to say (editorially
in the Democrat) that the Kokomo Dispatch of yester^
day "startles the nation and the hull creation'' by pub-
lishing a posthumous Poe Poem, "clamorously claiming
the honor of its first presentation to the world. Lack of
space prevents us from further remark; but we will
say, however, that of all the Nazareths now at larger
Kokomo is the last from which we would expect good to
come."

While "things were developing" Riley bethought him-
self of a mistake Walter Scott had made in not prais-
ing the Waverley novels. Scott's silence was proof to
Edinburgh that he wrote them. To avert a like
mistake Riley appeared at length editorially in
his own paper, — not however till the knowing
had begun to think upon his silence with suspicion,
particularly the editor of the rival paper, the Herald,
who expected "a rhapsody of jealous censure from
the jaunty sheet across the way." Under the caption,
"The Poet Poe in Kokomo," Riley considered in

;r^;jL'n,I..:e»..,-«,«.,w,us..,u,

THE LITERARY TORPEDO 881

the merits and the faults of ''Leonainie/' occasionally
deriding the "Poe-ish pretensions" and their claim to
verity. He quoted from the *'juicy introduction*' (in
the Dispatch) and then paid his compliments to the en-
raptured editor who had gone into 'Voluminous detail
on the chance discovery of the manuscript in an old
book now in possession of an illiterate resident of Ko-
komo. That gentleman states that his grandpa gave
him the book and that it came into the grandpa's pos-
session while in Chesterfield^ Virginia. According to
the story, a wild-eyed, dissipated young man had
stopped in a tavern over night and by morning had
flown, having scrawled in the old book over the initials
E. A. P., a curious poem. 'Only this and nothing
more.' "

Riley frankly admitted, editorially, that on reading
the Dispatch he was inwardly resolved not to be start-
led. He had thought to ignore ''Leonainie" entirely;
but "a sense of justice due — if not to Poe, to the poem"
— ^induced him to let slip a few remarks.

"We have given the matter," he continued, ''not a
little thought ! and in what we shall have to say regard-
ing it, we will say with purpose far superior to preju-
dicial motives, and with the earnest effort of beating
through the gloom a pathway to the light of truth."

Passing by "the many assailable points regarding fhe
birth and late discovery of the poem," he considered
first the authenticity of its authorship. "That a poem
contains some literary excellence," he said, "is no as-
surance that its author is a genius known to fame, for
how many waifs of richest worth are now afloat upon
the literary sea, whose authors are unknown, and whose
nameless names have never marked the graves that hid
their hidden value from the world. Let us look deeper

882 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

down, and pierce below the glare and gurgle of the sur-
face and analyze the poem and Poe's work at its real
worth."

And this, Kiley proceeded to do. The theme was one
that Poe would not likely select. 'Toe had a positive
aversion to children, and especially to babies.'' The
second stanza contained Poe's peculiar bent of thought
but in addition ''that weird faculty of attractively com-
bining with the delicate and beautiful, the dread and
repulsive — a power most rarely manifest, and quite be-
yond the bounds of imitation." The third stanza was
secondary in thought and the fourth in part mediocre.
It was fair to conclude, since 'Toe avoided the name of
Deity," that he did not write the last stanza.

'To sum up the poem as a whole we are at some loss/'
Riley concluded. "It most certainly contains rare at-
tributes of grace and beauty ; and although we have not
the temerity to accuse the gifted Poe of its authorship,
for equal strength of reason we cannot deny that it is
his production ; but as for the enthusiastic editor of the
Dispatch we are not inclined, as yet, to the belief that
he is wholly impervious to the wiles of deception."

There was a flourish of county paper trumpets in
that first fortnight of August, 1877. The two innocent
deceivers were kept wide awake. It was hurry and
hurrah. As Riley put it :

"On with the ruse ! let fakes be unconfined :
No sleep till mom when bards and critics meet
To chase the flaming hours with flying feet."

In a brief note, he hopes the Dispatch is not losing
faith. "God bless us, we are certainly at the very
threshold of success. Hold the fort ! If we could talk
for one square hour we could make ourselves believe if

THE LITERARY TORPEDO 383

August thirteenth brought another letter from the Dis-
patch. "Your two letters of Saturday received/' wrote
the editor. "I would like to visit you but cannot get
away. Have you seen notice in New York World, Trir
bune, Post; Chicago Tribune, Inter-Ocean; Cincinnati
papers, Courier Journal f I am saving all notices and
will publish them next week. Your notice in the Demo-
crat is capital ; so is HeraUCs but it sounds like you all
over." (The editor made a good guess; the plot was
thickening. It vms Riley all over: one editor of the
Herald had been admitted to the "ring around the tor-
pedo.*') "Our plot is developing rapidly," the Dispatch
editor continued ; "the ball is fairly in motion and will
not stop until it has reached every state in the Union.
No article was ever published in a country paper in
this State that has had such a run as this has and will
have. The end is not yet. I am anxious to see Atlantic,
Scribner^s, and so forth. They are the critics. Send
all extracts you find."

August sixteenth the Dispatch had just received a
letter from William F. Gill of Boston, who had written
a new life of Poe. Gill had the manuscript of "The
Bells" and could identify the Kokomo manuscript by it.
"What shall I write him ?" asks the Dispatch. "Where
is the original manuscript ? Notices still come from the
South. Send me all your clippings."

Where was the original manuscript, indeed? In the
issue of August sixteenth, the Dispatch referred to the
old book containing the manuscript, inadvertently say-
ing that "the book— the property of a gentleman of this
city — is now in our possession." This, Riley good-
naturedly considered "the fatal blunder of the Dispatch
editor." Within a week the editor discovered that
Riley, swayed by an old tie of friendship rather than

384 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

by good judgment, had admitted to the ''circle of
secrecy'' one who could not keep a secret. That was
Riley's ''fatal blunder/' and as the sequel proved, thq
"more fatal of the two."

The consequences of the editor's mistake were visited
on him immediately. There tuas no manuscript. Poe's
biographer offered to deposit any amount in Boston
for its safe return. The editor turned a deaf ear to
his plea. Representatives from the city dailies wrote
about it and "literary folks called in droves to see it."
"What shall we do?" wailed the editor. "Hold them off
a few days more," wrote Riley. "It certainly is as easy
to make a manuscript as it was to write the poem that
creates the sensation."

Then there was a stir in Anderson. Two friends, W.
J. Ethell and Samuel Richards, who were never far
from their "jingling" comrade when he was driven into
a comer, worked unceasingly on a manuscript, imitat-
ing Poe's handwriting from a facsimile of the original
manuscript of "The Bells." The facsimile did not con-
tain all the letters required and Richards, who made
the final draft, had necessarily to do some inventing.
And he did it well. "In some way," said Riley, "my
friend caught the spirit of the whole vocabulary, fur-
nishing a result that bewildered many notable and ex-
acting critics." Edmund Clarence Stedman remarked
that it was the best imitation of Poe he had seen. Rich-
ards copied the lines on the fly leaf of an old Ainswcrth
Dictionary procured from a law office and bought origi-
nally at a second-hand bookstore on Delaware Street,
Indianapolis, This done, Riley deftly concealed the old
book in brown wrapping paper and boarded the Pan
Handle accommodation for Kokomo. "That accommo-
dation," said he, "never carried a more restless pas-

ABRIDGMENT

AINSWORTH'S DICTIONARY,

StijiUfitfi wX9 %»tin.

DESIGNED FOR THE USE OF SCHOOLS,

THOMAS MORELL, D. D.

CABDVUr OOBSaCTXO AND OfPBOTSD VBOX XHB LAfV

UUmOK aVASTO xdrion bt jobn casst, il» d.

PHILADELPHIA I
PUBLISHED BY URIAH HUNT fc SON,

AB9 fOK tAit BT BoosssLLus aunouuT nBOVttBOVr

VnXBD STAnS.

386 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

senger. I was so fearful of detection, a shadow scared
me. I was even destitute of Dutch courage.

'Like one that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round walks on
And turns no more his head,
Because he knows a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread/

A thousand things I thought might happen. A wag
might snatch the dictionary from me. I might drop
dead of apoplexy. The train might be ditched by the
Jabberwock and my name might be found among the
dead. The brakeman and train-boy might bury me and
my old book on the spot. There was some consolation
in that. That would be a bona fide secret. Never yet,
so history shows, has the grave unsacked a feline."

On that trip to Kokomo Riley began to note what
the car wheels were saying. He called it the ''agony
of the rails." All the way over they repeated the du-
bious refrain, "How fur is it? — ^how fur is it? — ^how fur
is it?" Sometimes that refrain, ''stoical and relentless
as fate, grew so agonizing that it would lift him from
his seat and drag him up and down the aisle."

"Thirty-five miles," said Riley, recalling the experi-
ence, "and every mile a reach of torment." Riley had
doubts that the ruse would succeed even after his
friend had written in imitation of Poe's hand. This
accounts for his gloomy state of feeling on the way
to Kokomo.

"One day," said Mr. Henderson, long years after,
when serving his commonwealth as auditor of states
"one day I was well-nigh crazy worrying over the ab-
sence of the manuscript. It was a hot evening and I
was alone in the Dispatch office, when a red-mustached.

THE LITERARY TORPEDO 387

rough-looking young fellow, far from the sleek literary
man he is to-day, came in and introduced himself as
J. W. Riley. That was our first meeting. The surprise
was mutual. Both expected to meet an older man. 'The
burden is fallen from me !' I exclaimed, when I saw that
dictionary. Well, we held a council of war. Things
were moving along swimmingly, I remained at my
desk ; Riley went for a few days' rest to Greenfield."

Before leaving Kokomo Riley made a call on his
young friend of the Kokomo Tribune, Charles Phillips.

"What are you doing here ?" asked Phillips.

"Over to see that manuscript."

"Bloomy moonshine!" returned Phillips, contemp-
tuously. "They have no manuscript. Got it under
lock and key, I suppose!" he added with withering
irony.

Riley was disinclined to talk where others could
hear. "Have you a room where we could be alone?"
he whispered. They went upstairs, where, on entering
a room, Riley cautiously looked round, peeped into the
closet and locked the door and windows. Each moment
Phillips' curiosity grew less controllable. "I don't like
these flickerings of light on the wall," said Riley.
"They seem to take the shape of letters and words.
Are you sure no one can hear? Are there no cracks
in the wall?"

Being assured, a solemn silence followed — ^it seemed
an hour to Phillips — while Riley still kept peeping here
and there about the room. Finally, leaning against the
wall — "a picture of despair with tears brimming over
his eyelids," — ^he said, "I came — I came all the way
from Anderson to see that manuscript." Phillips
thought from the tone of disappointment in his voice
that the Dispatch had refused to let him see it. Sud-

388 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

denly advancing to Phillips, he whispered with meas-
ured breath and slow — ^'They have — ^they have — ^yes,
sir — ^they have the manuscript."

Then he went into details concerning the authentic-
ity of the poem. The Dispatch should guard it with
j^ous care. "The dear old book/' he said, ''is kept
under double lock and key. It was only after tearful
pleadings that I was permitted a sight of it. I heaved
a sigh of relief when the faded volume was once more
locked in the safe.''

"Leoloony — Leoloony/' repeated Phillips, as they de-
scended the stairs. "Leoloony," repeated his guest at
parting. On the train to Greenfield "Leoloony" came
prancing from Riley's fancy in foolish jingle :

"Leoloony, angels called her;
And they took the bloom
Of the tickled stars and walled her
In her nom de plume.''

"How this world is given to lying I" remarked Phil-
lips, a few days later when he discovered the real
situation. Recalling those artificial tears, and the
night and the noiseless presence of invisible spectators,
he thought Riley should seek his fortune on the stage.
''He could make," said Phillips, "one of the matchless
actors of his time."

While Riley was recruiting at Greenfield, the IHs-
patoh was living in clover. The editor had full pos-
session of the field. Each day brought "fresh evidence
of success. The New York Herald had nibbled, and
the New York Sun. Sailing before the wind, 'Leonai-
nie' was destined to see and be known in distant lands/'
Whether favorably or unfavorably known was not
nearly so important as to make the "big dailies stand
on their heads and bark furiously/' "A new-found

THE LITERARY TORPEDO 389

poem," said the Nashville American, "has been charged
to Edgar A. Poe. If that gentleman eyer wanders any-
where in spirit, he will surely pay his respects to the
scalp of the Indiana man that wrote it." "The poem
bears no internal evidence of Poe's paternity," said the
Indianapolis News. "Romantic enough," said the
Brooklyn Eagle, — "looks altogether like romance. The
story is wild enough to have been written under the
influence of Egyptian whiskey." "The unfortunate
Poe," said the Baltimore American, "was doubtless
guilty of many indiscretions, but it is hard to suppose
that in his most eccentric moods he would have at-
tempted to foster upon his fame the name of *Leonai-
nie/ " "A poem is going the rounds of the press," said
the Philadelphia Commonwealth, "having been discov-
ered among the rubbish of a Hoosier literary club by
a lunatic of Kokomo. Two or three lines will show its
spirit and style :

'And they made her hair of gloomy
Midnight, and her eyes of bloomy
Moonshine, and they brought her to me
In the solemn night.'

The gin mills of Maryland and the Old Dominion never
turned out liquor bad enough to debase the genius of
Poe to the level of that verse. It is a libel on his
memory to hint of such doleful idiocy."

The big dailies did "bark furiously" — ^no doubt of
that. From Boston through Washington to Mobile and
New Orleans, and back through Richmond and across
the continent to San Francisco, the comment was about
equally divided between hisses and applause.

"Abusive, insinuating, malevolent," observes the
reader. Precisely so, and precisely the thing required.
The hammering process is as essential in the evolution

890 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

of a poet as in the making of a soldier. ''We say words
in the moonlight^'' said the soldierly Myron Reed, 'that
we do not stand up to in the dajrtime. When the band
plays and there is cheering and the girls are waving
handkerchiefs, it is easy to enlist 'for three years or the
war' ; but afterwards, south of the Ohio, plugging along
in the mud — ^that is different/' It was one thing for
Riley to receive applause, — ^but hisses were different.
Nevertheless they were decisive factors. They were
the test. If he could withstand them he might be
worthy of renown. The author of "Leonainie" had
much to say about the "sublime satisfaction and proud
complacency" of the critic. Yet that despised critic
was a means of making him serviceable to mankind.
The critic hammers the self-sufficiency out of young
writers.

While gathering poems for another book, he was
inclined to rewrite "Leonainie" before including it
in the volume; but, "since the nimbus round it/' as
he said, "is historical rather than poetical," he finally
permitted the lines to remain as they were originally
written.

Many newspapers charged the paternity of "Leo-
nainie" to tiie editor of the Dispatch. "Th^y
do me too much honor," retorted the editor. "The
furor is in its incipiency," he said editorially
August twenty-third. "The poem is traveling
on the wind. The ablest critics of the land have
leveled their lenses upon it. If we have been the
victim of a deception, we are willing as anybody to
know it. We believe in the paternity of the poem and
can wait with complacency the verdict of the reading
public. The original manuscript together with the book
from which the leaves were torn is now in our posses-

THE LITERARY TORPEDO 391

sion. The book is one of an old edition of Ainsworth's
Dictionary, considerably time-worn. The poem is writ-
ten in pale ink of a bluish tinge on the fly leaf taken
from the back of the book. The chirography is remark-
ably clear and can be read as easily as print. Of course
it is somewhat dimmed by time and exposure. It is
written on both pages of a single leaf. The manuscript
will be sent East to critics for examination and judg-
ment. The poem is indeed remarkable, and its acci-
dental discovery is a valuable contribution to Ameri-
can literature."

While Riley was resting at Greenfield things were de-
veloping over at Anderson. An event there that con-
cerns the issue of the Poe-Poem venture was the con-
versation of two men on Sunday night, August 19, 1877.
They had entered the corner of the Court House yard
and seated themselves under a Carolina poplar. They
had been talking very earnestly at the restaurant.
As Riley said, "they had thawed their grief with
steaming coffee and their hearts had grown warm over
their woes." He went on to describe their surround-
ings and the night. "The people," he said, "were home
from church with the supreme satisfaction that attends
tired pilgrims at the close of the sweet day of rest.
Lovers were cooing quietly in pleasant hiding-places
and old folks were dreaming of toll-gates and splint-
bottomed chairs. The alleys were fragrant with tin
cans and virtuous herbs. The leaves and flowers, birds
and beasts, and creeping things in the grass and on
the back porch were performing their functions in the
usual manner. At the edge of town the broad expanse
of cornfields stretched away to the purple woods, and
in the distance the solar system worked respectfully at
its appointed task."

892 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

The two men under the Carolina poplar were James
McClanahan and Stephen Metcalf, one of the proprie-
tors of the Anderson Herald. "The time has come for
this bubble to burst,'' said McClanahan, referring to
the Poe Poem — ^nine simple words but they were
charged with the constituents of gunpowder. They
were uttered by the man who again and again had
signed himself, "Yours forever, European BalsancL" He
had been admitted to the "circle of secrecy*' around the
literary torpedo and could no longer keep the secret.
"The dear boy !" how came he to break the seal of con-
fidence ? How came he to drop a firebrand on the path
of "the dearest friend he had on earth" — ^he who had
found that friend a luckless disconsolate in overalls
and bowled away with him to a legendary world — ^who
had wandered with him up hill and down dale in search
of the Golden Fleece — ^who had drifted away to the
Wisconsin woods and brought him tidings of the
"Golden Girl" — ^how came he in the tense moments of
a hapless venture to be disobedient to a trust? ''No-
body knows," said an intimate friend, "but him and
the 'Sphinx' and neither is saying anything." It is an
unraveled riddle. There was a ratchet loose somewhere
but certain it is that the Graphic Chum did not disobey
his trust maliciously. Riley was not embittered by the
part he played. "We are friends," he said, "and will
be in the Dim Unknown."

The hour had struck for the Anderson Herald. For
weeks it had been chaffing over the success of the
Democrat Its subscription list had suffered from the
popularity of the "Jingling Editor." At last it had a
journalistic "scoop" with dimensions. The time had
come for it to "lash its rival with its lighting." Mon-

THE LITERARY TORPEDO 393

day morning the "secret" was walking up and down
the streets. There was an envious chatter among com-
positors in the Herald composing room —

"Sockety — ^hockety — ^wockety wump —
Pillikum — pollikum — ^plumpty pump/'

"Your Foe Poem has assumed a new phase here/'
wrote the faithful William M. Groan of the Democrat
"The Herald has just got wind of it and swears it will
expose the entire thing in coming issue. I write you
as a friend warning you of the danger."

Groan's warning reached Riley Monday night. At
first he was dizzy over the threatened revelation. He
could not realize it. "And this is life, I believe. Oh,
certainly. Why not?" he muttered to himself in the
mock-heroic way of Dick Swiveller. As the hours
wore on to midnight the complications over-
whelmed him. He and his friends had striven
strenuously. He thought of the two weeks past as
a perilous chariot drawn by a double span of
horses and driven by an orphan. A master hand
would have driven a winning race. Now the horses'
legs were outside the traces and they were pulling and
twisting every which way. Just my luck, thought he ;
"the cat's away and the mice they play; the frost
breaks up and the water runs. Edgar Allan Poe" — ^he
moaned dolefully — "just thirteen letters — urducky for
Poe — urdiccky for everything connected with him.*'

The opportune moment having arrived, the expos6
was sprung, — ^but not in the Herald, as the Demx>crai
expected. The Herald proprietor could not make
his threat good. One of his associates — ^the "rival
editor" in the war of words that preceded Riley's de-

394 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

cision to test his theory — ^in some unaccountable man-
ner had been admitted to the ''ring around the torpedo."
While he freely hammered the "Jingling Poet," he
would not carry his cudgeling to the breach of a trust.
Though "cold and metallic in face/' said Riley, **his
heart was soft and warm as the heart of youth." The
Herald therefore had to content itself with sending the
expos6 to its friendly neighbor, the Kokomo Tribune,
which, according to its rival, the Dispatch, "jumped
for the sensation as a bullfrog would leap for a red
flannel bait."

The Herald quoted its friendly contemporary with
ghoulish glee : "Upon our first page," it said editori-
ally, "we present the Tribune's exposure of the poetical
fraud 'Leonainie/ We are sorry that Mr. J. W. Riley
should have proven himself so mendacious, and sorrier
still that he is the author of the poem. We might have
forgiven him his want of veracity but it is hard to
condone *Leonainie.' "

The expose was of course a feat for the newspapers.
It was not "the little stir among the state exchanges/'
which Riley anticipated when he launched the venture.
The critics began to "erupt volcanically."

The exchanges had a great deal to say about ''a lit-
erary forgery," and the dead Poe, the "chief victim/'
who was powerless to avenge the wrong done his name
and honor. As they saw it, the Poe Poem and the
"verse carpenter" who wrote it, deserved the oppro-
brium heaped upon them. Saucy weeklies talked volu-
bly about "a great fraud," "insufferable nonsense," the
"unscrupulous young man," and "an exceedingly fool-
ish piece of criminality." A Detroit daily regretted that
the American people had been deluded into the idea
that there really does exist in Indiana a place by the

THE LITERARY TORPEDO 895

name of Kokomo. "The poem," said a New York daily,
"effectually sets at rest whatever suspicion there may
have been that the author had the material out of which
a poet is made." Many journals saw "an impassable
grulf " between Riley and fame. "A brilliant career had
been blighted and forever lost to the literary world/'

When abuse had run its course, the Kokomo Dispatch
summed up the situation as follows : —

"Our object in the ruse was two-fold, both of which
have been accomplished: First, to perpetuate a quiet
pleasant joke, which we would afterward explain; sec-
ond, to give Mr. Riley's genius as a poet a fair, full
and impartial test before the ablest critics in the land,
uninfluenced by local prejudice or sectional bias. The
only fiction about the transaction was the Poe story.
The poem possesses a vast deal of merit, and would do
no violence to the reputation of our more pretentious
bards of today. Although it has been roughly criticized
in certain quarters, it has been praised as the work of
genius in others. No poem ever passed through a more
relentless gauntlet of criticism. None has ever had a
more general reproduction by the press. Mr. Riley is
a young poet of great promise and will we predict yet
make his mark as one of the sweetest singers of the
age."

In the hopeful meantime — although it seemed hope-
less— ^what was the fate of the "Verse Carpenter" ? To
give a fanciful turn to a fanciful incident, as related by
his comrade Nye, the literary fledgling had leaned from
his high chair far out to catch a dainty, gilded butter-
fly, and lost his footing and with a piercing shriek had
fallen headlong to the gravel walk below ; and when he
was picked up, he was — ^he was a poet. But he was a
poet caught in the arms of doom^ Instead of drifting

896 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

away from him like a dream, 'lieonainie" had returned,
the enfant terrible.

The depth of despair into which the poet was
plunged by the wave of criticism and reproach and its
effect on his conduct and literary output are reserved
for the next chapter.

Said Riley, years after the exposure, 'The tirade
and outcries are all smiling material now, but then
they were pathos from away-back."

''That fly leaf !" he once protested, plucking the nettle
from his past, ''how the woof of my destiny has been
warped around that. When a schoolboy I wrote my
name on a fly leaf of an old reader with enough extra
flourish at the bottom for a lasso, wrote it with dreamy
speculations of the sensation it would some day create
beneath a picture of myself in a cocked hat, a plume,
and a ruffled collar — such as Sir Walter Raleigh wore,
don't you know. Well, the extra flourish and sensation
came when the 'Famous Fake' went bounding through
the land. I came so perilously near losing my pelt then
that I have been scared from A. to Izzard ever since.^

After the whirlwind of comments on ''Leonainie,"
"posthumous poetry" was the talk of the time. Re-
porters went prowling round neighborhoods in search
of clues to mysteries, and when they could not find
them, they invented them. An unpublished poem by
Bret Harte was found at Efiingham, Illinois, while car-
penters were tearing down an old schoolhouse. The
poem, it was said, was written on narrow strips of
manila wrapping paper, in Harte's well-known fCTiI-
nine hand. The author had passed that way while
walking from San Francisco to New York, and de-
posited the poem in the schoolhouse wall. Another
posthumous production was found on a headstone in

THE LITERARY TORPEDO 897

Iowa. Still another in Virginia — f"a poetic fragment
written with chalk on the inside of a bam door." Picck
entertained its readers with "some more bloomy moon-
shine poetry by the late author of the 'Raven.' " A
fisherman with a magnifying-glass described strange
hieroglyphics on a turtle shell on the banks of the
Wabash — ^^'unquestionably the last work of the gifted
but erratic Poe.'*

"My friends want to know my feelings," said Riley
in later years. "I refer them to Mr. Jobling, who
saw the storm break on the Western Road out of
London. It was the most dismal period of my life.
The Democrat said I was rusticating a few days at
Greenfield. I was abdicating. My tinsel throne was
crumbling. Friends stood aside — ^went round the other
way. I went out on the porch and sighed like a wet
forestick. Even the pump was disinclined to welcome
my return. Over at Anderson I saw myself walking
alone around the Court House square at night through
the drizzle and rain, peering longingly at the dim light
in the office where I sometimes slept. Hearts in there
were as hard and dark and obdurate as the towel in
the composing room. In those hot silent nights I saw
the lightning quiver on the black horizon ; I heard hol-
low murmurings in the wind. Within a week I was
encysted in pitchy darkness. The lightning was not an
optical illusion. It was at hand, crooked, dazzling and
resentful. The rain poured down like Heaven's wrath.
Every trembling, vivid, flickering instant I breathed
in horror of impending doom."

When traveling with his friend Nye, a decade later,
time had so mollified his heartache that Riley could joke
about it. He once drew a pen and ink sketch of himself
chasing his hat in the wind. With one hand he clutched

398 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

his ''reticule'' of poems ; with the other he clung to an
umbrella turned wrong side out by the gale. Both man
and hat were pursued by the wrath of critics — and the
rain. ''Oh the rain !" he would solemnly repeat to Nye,

"The rain ! the rain ! the rain ! —
Pouring with never a pause,
Over the fields and green bywajrs— s
How beautiful it was!"

In the midst of all the noise and distraction of his
Poe-Poem days, there was one thing if nothing else that
was perfectly clear and that was that the detractors
who prophesied oblivion for the "Verse Carpenter,"
knew nothing about it. His future was not in their
keeping. In those hours of darkness, the winds alone
were his messengers. Occasionally he was soothed by
the whisperings of a gentle zephjrr, but for the most
part the visitations came in squalls. "I am the Wind/'
he made the wind say in a poem he was then writing
for the Kokomo Dispatch,

"I am the Wind, and I rule mankind.
And I hold a sovereign reign
Over the lands as God designed.
And the waters they contain :
Lo ! the bound of the wide world round
Falleth in my domain."

There came the last week of August a ray of com-
fort from an accomplished young woman of Anderson,
Miss Jessie Fremont Myers — afterward Mrs. William
M. Groan — a prediction that, in the light of subsequent
events, may be set over against all the mouthings
of his detractors. "I am indeed sorry/' she wrote^
"that your plan, contrived without a single dishonoz^
able thought or motive, has received such an urnnanly

THE LITERARY TORPEDO 399

blow just as it is smiling into perfection. But I can-
not agree with the Tribune that it will result in any
serious damage to you for I still believe that the true
votaries of genius will still yield you homage and that
the laurel wreath fame was twining for your brow, will
adorn it as if *Leonainie' had never been written."

At Anderson also there was a whisper of hope from
the Artist Comrade — and a bit of wisdom from a
banker, John W. Pence. "There, Little Man," said the
banker, *'don't cry; the future is before you; go to
work." "The day is coming," said the artist to a
friend, "when we will be proud we were friends of
Riley. His poems have the true ring — ^he is bound to
come to the front." Mrs. Jordan of the Richmond In-
dependent wrote some hopeful words about the poetic
waif bom in the corner of an obscure paper, that was
being so mysteriously wafted to periodicals beyond the
sea. "Count me an ardent admirer of the lamented
Poe," she said. "Let us do what we can to honor the
genius of the great departed."

"After sorrowing and parboiling for a fortnight,"
said Riley, "I resolved to make a clean breast of the
whole thing." Accordingly the following :

Greenfield, Indiana, August 29, 1877.
Editor of Indianapolis Journal,

Dear Sir :

Will you do me the especial favor of publishing the
enclosed in your issue of to-morrow ? Very truly,

J. W. Riley.

The enclosure was his "Card to the Public." The
Journal, however, like all other papers, after the ex-
pos^, was not certain of the card's authenticity. Riley's
own handwriting was questioned. On the morrow they
published the request as :

400 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

THE ALLEGED POE-POEM CARD FROM MR. J. W. RILEY.

To the Public-
Having been publicly accused of the authorship of
the poem, ''Leonainie/' and again of the far more griev-
ous error of an attempt to falsely claim it, I deem it
proper to acknowledge the justice of the first accusa-
tion. Yes, as much as I regret to say it, I am the
author; but in justice to the paper that originally pro-
duced it, and to myself as well, I desire to say a few
words more.

The plan of the deception was originally suggested to
me by a controversy with friends, in which I was fool-
ish enough to assert that ''no matter the little worth of
a poem, if a great author's name was attached, it would
be certain of success and popularity.'' And to establish
the truth of this proposition I was unfortunate enough
to select a ruse, that, although establishing my theory^
has been the means of placing me in a false light, as
well as those of my friends who were good enough to
assist me in the scheme ; for when we found our literary
bombshell bounding throughout the length and breadth
of the Union we were so bewildered and involved we
knew not how to act. Our only intercourse had been
by post, and we could not advise together fairly in that
way ; in consequence, a fibrous growth of circumstances
had chained us in a manner, and a fear of unjust cen-
sure combined to hold us silent for so long. To fi^d
at last a jocular explosion of the fraud, we thought-
lessly employed a means both ill-advised for ourselves
and others. And now, trusting the public will only con-
demn me for the folly, and hold me blameless of all
dishonorable motives wherein I have feigned ignorance
of the real authorship of the poem, and so f orth, and
so forth,

I am yours truly,

J. W. Riley.

CHAPTER XVm

WEATHERING THE STOBII

THERE is a classic allusion to Arion which lypi-^
fies Rilejr's fate the first fortnight of September,
1877. Most provident in peril, says Shake-
speare in praise of his hero,

"He bound himself
(Courage and hope both teaching him the practice)
To a strong mast that li v'd upon the sea ;
Where like Arion on the dolphin's bacl^
He held acquaintance with the waves.
So long as I could see/'

The Poe-Poem ruse had failed and the expos6 had
plunged Riley into a sea of despair. He was literally
holding acquaintance with waves and winds. He had
been the victim of one of those vulgar accidents of life,
according to Lord Beaconsfield, that should be borne
without a murmur. He did not bear it without a mur-
mur, but he did bear it. He did not sink beneath the
weight of woe. ^

It was all laughing material years after when the
experience was "dramatized" in a cartoon for Nye and
Riley's Railway Guide — ^the Hoosier Poet riding on
the dolphin's back, with a golden wreath on his brow,
a lyre in his arms and a tunic flowing in the wind from
his shoulders — all merry-making then, but at the time
the ordeal, in Riley's words, "was a fortnight of woe for
the infernal gods." All that remained of his fatal ven-
ture seemed a barren waste surrounded by desolation.

401

402 JAMES WIIITCOMB RILEY

The "fortnight of woe" explains the allusion to Riley
as the *'Arion of Grief." His fate did indeed rhyme
with the narrative in the Age of Fable. Like Arion he
was a musician and a great favorite. He longed for
recognition in the East. Friends besought him to be
content :

"Stay where you are."

"Stay on the Democrat

"Paint signs."

His answer tallied substantially with that in the
fable. He longed to make his gift a source of pleasure
to others, and the conviction had been borne in upon
him that he could do it with song.

That period of gloom like many other seasons of
darkness, was brimming with possibilities — proof once
more that "man's extremity is God's opportunity."
Out of it came a lyric — "We Are Not Always Glad
When We Smile" — ^that in beauty of pathos has few
rivals in the English tongue — ^another instance that
our laughter

"With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest

thought."

How could Riley be so gay while his heart was in
mourning? How could he smile and even laugh when
he felt that, for him, the end of all earthly happiness
had come? Hear him —

"We are not always glad when we smile, —
For the heart in a tempest of pain.
May live in the guise
Of a smile in the eyes
As a rainbow may live in the rain :
And the stormiest night of our woe

WEATHERING THE STORM 403

May hang out a radiant star

Whose light in the sky

Of despair is a lie
As black as the thunderclouds are.

"We are not always glad when we smile :
Though we wear a fair face and are gay.

And the world we deceive

May not ever believe
We could laugh in a happier way.
Yet, down in the deeps of the soul,
Oftljimes with our faces aglow.

There's an ache and a moan

That we know of alone,
And as only the hopeless may know."

Such is a glimpse of his woe in verse. He also writes
of it in the following letter to a woman he dearly
loved, the Lady of Tears he sometimes called her when
he thought of the sorrow in her life, Miss Eudora Kate
Myers of Anderson — afterward Mrs. William J.
Kinsley —

Greenfield, Indiana, September 15, 1877.
Dear Woman:

Your letter of yesterday does me a world of good, for
although it hurt in many ways, it showed me still the
great strength of your love, and with so great a treas-
ure in my keeping must I not be strong and brave to
meet all the ills with true manliness, and not with the
coward heart I have shown for so long. You find fault
with me for not telling you my trouble, and ssLying I
am not satisfied with your love. You do me wrong —
indeed you do I My love for you is so great that I have
tried to hold from you only that which would give
you extra pain to know and God knows I give you
misery enough. Look up here in my face and read the
last week's misery I have passed and you will not offer
me a chiding word. I have walked down— down in
hell so far that your dear voice had almost failed to
reach me, but thank God I can hear you, though I

404 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

may not touch your hand till I have washed my own
in tears of repentance. My steps are turning gladly
toward the light, and it seems to me sometimes I al-
most see God's face. I have been sick — sick of the
soul, for had so fierce a malady attacked the body, I
would have died with all hell hugged in my arms. I
can speak of this now because I can tell you I am
saved, and my noble woman will be filled with joy to
know that God bends down and listens to her prayers.
In fancy now my arms cling round you as the pilgrim
to the cross, and through a storm of tears the sunshine
of your smiles breaks on me, as I say,

"The burden has fallen from me-
lt is buried in the sea.
And only the sorrow of others
Throws its shadow over me."

I will not now talk longer of myself — ^there is no end
of that, and I shall not be selfish any more but hum-
ble— very, very humble. You must never say again
you are not worthy of my love. You could not hurt
me deeper. My worth compared with yours, I tell you
truly, for I know, "Is as moonlight unto sunlight and as
water unto wine." I'm growing better though and
humbly pray that God may brighten up the poor dim
remnant of my worth that it at last may shine a jewel
of one lustre with your own.

How inexpressibly sorrowful were those autumn
weeks of 187Z, when alone Riley walked among the
great elms on the banks of Brandywine, when

"The long black shadows of the trees
Fell o'er him like their destinies."

The leaves "dropped on him their tears of dew." At
times he seemed to stand on a beach with its waste of
sands before him. "I could hear the roar of breakers,**
he said; "low clouds brushed by me — ^just solitude^
wreck and ruin — ^nothing more."

WEATHERING THE STORM 405

It does seem that his fate was to be "fanged with
frost and tongued with flame." His station was not
to be the tripod of the Democrat, nor the grind of any
other journalistic field. Like his King of Slumberland,
his dais was to be woven of rays of starlight and
jeweled with gems of dew, and sometimes he was to
occupy a throne wrought of blackest midnight. He was
destined to hold communion with those mighty phan-
toms, Our Ladies of Sorrow. In some way unknown
to the average mortal the poet was to be kept in touch
with the deep silence that reigns in their kingdoms.
One shudders at the sound of their mysterious words : —
"Suffer not woman and her tenderness to sit near him
in his darkness. Banish the frailties of hope ; wither
the relenting of love ; scorch the fountain of tears. So
shall he be accomplished in the furnace ; so shall he see
the things that ought not to be seen, sights that are
abominable, and secrets that are unutterable. So shall
he read the elder truths, fearful truths. So shall he
rise again before he dies. And so shall our conunis-
sion be accomplished which from God we had, — ^to
plague his heart until we had unfolded the capacities
of his spirit.'*

*'Every man," said Riley, *Tias his dragon as well as
his Daemon; in this, sinner and saint are alike. The
shining figure of the Daemon precedes him, the dragon
dogs his footsteps. I have my dragon and thereby is
established my relation to mankind. Doctor Johnson
had his and I take it that is one reason for the abiding
interest of the race in what he said and did." In that
fortnight immediately following the expos6, the poet
was not only suffering from the torture of critics and
the shattered hope of literary recognition. His heart

406 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

was also breaking over a lapse from sobriety. His
dragon seized and shook him as a mastiff. As he ex-
pressed it» he was ''fighting another battle with the blue
flame J' The channels of his thought had been obscured
and his progress imperiled by his ''besetting sin."
"Friends offered sympathy," he said ; "how could thqr
sympathize when their souls had not been bruised with
adversity? They had not been steeped to the lips in
misery ; they had not seen their fondest hopes perish ;
they had not bared their faces on the earth at night;
they had not suffered the pangs of humiliation* What
could they know —

'Of the frenzy and fire of the brain,
That grasps at the fruitage forbidden'?

There are hours in the battle with this disease when a
man can breathe no prayer, nor utter a cry, hours
when he

'Bends and sinks like a column of sand
In the whirlwind of his great despair.' "

Carlyle points out that David, the Hebrew King» was
a man of blackest crimes, "no want of sins, yet he was
the man according to God's own hearf He had
learned the significance of sackcloth and ashes. ''Of all
acts," says the author, "is not, for a man, repentance
the most divine ? What are faults," he asks, "what are
the outward details of a life ; if the inner secret of it,
the remorse, temptations, true, often-baffled, never-
ended struggle of it, be forgotten?" What is a man's
life if he is not touched with a feeling of our infirmi-
ties?

Repentance is the word that looms large on the
poet's horizon after the Poe-Poem episode.

TlIE rOKT AT THE AOE OP TWENTT-EIGHT

Fil'sl lii.liH-.if llifT.mlisllil'I.'l

WEATHERING THE STORM 407

"Pitilessly, year by year
From the farthest past to here,
Fate had fallen like a blight
On the blossoms of delight/'

and he realized as never before that he was diiefly re-
sponsible for that fate. Now God was bending down
and listening to his prayers — and the prayer of his
Lady of Tears. Thus it seemed he "could almost see
God's face." Had he left no other record of himself
than this, he would deserve the homage of fallen hu-
manity everywhere. In that "storm of tears" he mas-
tered himself and made "his torture tributary to his
will." In that eventful time there began "the faithful
struggle of an earnest human soul towards what is
good and best" — ^a struggle often baffled but never
abandoned. Face to face with the picture of his woe
he clung to his purpose. He resolved '*not to fade away
in the darkness of alcoholic night" — and he kept his
word. "The Lord is my shepherd," he prayed ; "surely
goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my
life" — and they did. The day he was not tempted
to drink, which he so fervently anticipated, never
came ; but the day did come when he could resist the
temptation.

Men and women have never withheld their love from
the man who rises superior to misfortune. If while ris-
ing he fall, they mantle the fall with their compassion.
If he have a besetting sin, their interest in him never
flags so long as he strives manfully to detach himself
from it. "Who," asks the old monk Thomas h Eempis,
"hath a harder battle to fight than he who striveth for
self-mastery?" After all, the great victory is to whip
the offending Adam out of life, and this Riley prch
ceeded to do, beginning with a strong hand the fall of

408 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

1877. Henceforth as hitherto, the people were with
him. They gave him freely of their sympathy and
love.

It is refreshing to note a cause of the people's sym-
pathy. In those notable years of the seventies, a re*
markable man, Robert Collyer, came from his Chicago
pulpit to Indiana towns with his lecture on "Clear
Grit.'' Few speakers surpassed him in the power to
mould public sentiment. Riley dearly loved him be-
cause of his large-hearted incentives. "CoUyer had
been through the crucible," said Riley. "He knew what
it meant to grapple a great temptation by the throat."

"A man may have all sorts of shining qualities," said
CoUyer in the lecture; "he may be as handsome as
Apollo, as plausible as Mercury, and as full of fight as
Mars, and yet be a bit of mere shining paste— no dia-
mond at all. On the other hand, a man's faults and
failings may be an everlasting regret to those who love
him best, as they are in a man like Robert Bums. But
because there's Clear Grit in him, because there's a bit
of manhood running through his life as grand and good
as ever struggled through this world of ours toward a
better ; a heart that could gather everything that lives
within the circle of its mighty sympathy, from a mouse
shivering in a furrow, to a saint singing in Heaven;
because there's a heart like that in him, we cling to his
knees, we will not let him go ; sin-smitten, but mighty,
manful man, as he is, we gather him into our heart,
everyone of us, and love him with an everlasting love."

It was the Burns quality in Riley's songs and the
discovery of Clear Grit in his character back there in
the latter seventies that endeared him to the people of
Indiana. They had found a man who was touched with
a feeling for their infirmities. Thus finding him tfa^

WEATHERING THE STORM 409

were not unmindful of his sorrows. Nor did they dis-
prize his songs because he was the victim of the bUie
flame'— t

"For his tempted and wandering feet,
Were the songs of David less pure and sweet?"

There was a dragon between the poet and the Golden
Fleece but that did not deter him. He would have the
Fleece at all hazards and it was this determination that
deepened the people's love. They would not "throw
away a pineapple because it had a rough coat." Here
and there were friends who had witnessed Riley's
rapture after his release from the Beast, as he
sometimes called the blue flxime. The depth of grati-
tude spiritualized and transfigured in his face was
unforgetable. It was evident to them that he had not
yielded to the tempter without inwardly protesting
against him. "Release from the clutches of the Beast,"
Riley once said, "is as sweet to me as the vision of peace
to a nation after war. I dreamed once I was a country
besieged by a foreign foe. I never could tell when or
where the foe would strike, nor could I ever compass
his strength. Sometimes I was able to repel him at
the first blow; at other times he would march inland
and leave desolation and grief in his path before I
was able to defeat him and drive him from my king-
dom. Not a silly dream either," he added. "Man en-
larged, with his passions, possibilities and perils, is
the nation ; and the nation diminished is the man."

The struggles of the poet with adverse fate revealed
him a man of uncommon order. They manifested the
heroic — endurance of agonies. He had capacities for
infinite pain, and, growing out of these, fertility of re-
sources. His "sufferings being of an immortal nature,"

410 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

his knowledge of the invisible world — ^the world so near
us we can not comprehend it — ^his knowledge of that
world reached far beyond the ken of average thought^
and that meant jewels of song that otherwise had not
enhanced the joy of mankind.

The Poe Poem with its numerous complications was
succeeded by what Riley called an ''era of prosperity,"
a period of two years wherein, from the standpoint of
pure genius, he did his greatest work. They were the
second and third years of his "Prolific Decade." In-
cluding good, bad and indifferent, one thousand ix>enis
are credited to his pen. Two hundred of these, to-
gether with many sketches in prose, were written the
two years following September, 1877. That two-year
period of untrammelled endeavor was a heavenly con-
trast to the ten years of rough traveling that preceded
it. He was blessed with the smile of thirty moons,
"a total abstinence turnpike," he phrased it, "which
glancing back over he found as true as the sij^ts
of a level."

Riley never credited artificial stimulants with
a single poem or story although there were occa-
sional rumors to the contrary. "There is a
theory abroad," said he, "that writers succeed
by wooing the means of weakness and debilily; as
Shakespeare has it, by applying hot and rebellious
liquors in their blood. They succeed, not by such a
course, but in spite of it. From ancient times, men
have sacrificed mind and money at the shrine of Bac-
chus; in the phrase of the street, become vassals of
King Booze ; millions have gone down to defeat ; others,
some of them great and mighty men, have fought and
won their way to fame. They did not win because of
drink but in spite of it. Rum does, strangely enough.

WEATHERING THE STORM 411

lubricate the grooves of life, and under its gloze the
world of care becomes a harmless jest, but nothing
worth saving was ever written then. A maudlin effort
is always a weak effort. I can imagine a poet under the
pretense of intoxication, reeling to the door of a friend
at midnight. After being admitted and pitied, I hear
him say, 'Give me some paper — ^I want to write a poem.'
The next morning the friend relates the incident to his
neighbors and says the fellow wrote 'Bells Jangled.' He
had not done so. The pretender had thought on the
poem for two weeks and had every line of it at his
command when he entered his friend's house. Some
authors think it an honor to have the fame of writing
under the influence of wine. I want no such reputation.
A man must be in his right mind if he writes poetry
worth reading. Once in Indianapolis there lived a
poet who was always posing as one who wrote poetry
on the spur of the moment. It was not true. Previous-
ly he had worked for days on a poem which his idolaters
supposed he wrote at a desk in ten minutes while they
looked on in open-eyed wonder."

'When you reckon up nature," Myron Reed once
said to Riley, "it is not fair to take one side
only, and add together June mornings, and bird
songs, and rainbows, and the gladness of the grass
and grain. There is another very serious set of
items that must come in somewhere. The air of the
June morning that plumes the feathers of the robin may
be twisted before night into a cyclone. We are in a
world where the devil, mountain lions and silver-tipped
bears are loose. Our enemies are not in a cage. Pleas-
ant it is to see the sun, pleasant to lean out of your
window on moonlight nights to hear the bugle and lis-
ten to 'The Campbells Are Coming' ; but to be a Camp-

412 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

bell in a pair of wet horse-hide boots wrinkled at the
ankles — ^that is different. It is a slow process/' con-
cluded Reed, smiling at Riley's dream of spotless de-
portment, ''a slow process training a river, a tiger and
a man. There is the inclination to return to the old
way." Mark Twain had said, ^'Habit is habit and not
to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed
down stairs a step at a time."

It was a slow process — the formation of character.
Resolutions were necessary to that end, and back there
in the fall of 1877 Riley made some. He got a cue
from the saying of a wise old Indianapolis lawyer,
Calvin Fletcher, who had also been a successful farmer,
banker and railroad promoter. ^'If I have business re-
lations with a man," said the lawyer, ''and he gets
angry at me or does not act right, it is my fault My
business is to see that everybody with whom I deal shall
do right. I charge myself with the responsibility."
Riley promptly saw the wisdom of the law-
yer's course. If I am not upright in thought and
conduct, he reasoned, it is my fault. If I do not
have friends and health it is my fault. If others do not
love me it is my fault. If the critics do not praise my
poems, if I do not reach the goal, it is my fault. Thus
he made a map of the country through which he was
to travel, put up guide-posts, all pointing to a rosy
triumph. And it was good for him to do so, although
he did not always travel in the forward direction.
From his youth he had had a sharp eye for outward
things, but he had been a hazy student of himself.
Now, however, self -study became an absorbing subject^
the unlocking of hidden faculties, the searching anal-
ysis of his powers and their relation to the place he
was to occupy in the world. Knowledge of all men

WEATHERING THE STORM 413

meant, first, self-knowledge ; the control of others, self-
control, and so forth.

^'Are there not some exceptions to this doctrine of
personal responsibility?'' asked a reporter some years
after Riley had made his resolution. ''Exceptions?
Lord, no!" was the prompt reply. "It will work all
the way up the scale. If I am not President of the
United States, it is my fault." There were some ex-
ceptions but the conquering spirit of YOUTH in the poet
would not tolerate them.

Perhaps the most valuable lesson that Riley learned
from the Poe-Poem experience was the wise con-
struction he put on the use of adversity. "If some
misfortune can befall him — all will be well." This
seems a heartless remark and some can not forgive
Emerson for making it. Riley saw wisdom in it.
Through the mist of tears he perceived that the ugly
and venomous toad we call adversity does truly wear
a precious jewel in its head. There was such a thing
as thriving on misfortune. "By going wrong things
had come right." A friend wrote to ask if he was dis-
couraged over the "Leonainie Downfall."

"Discouraged ? God bless you, no," was the homely
reply. "It has fattened me like a Thanksgiving
turkey."

Now that he has surmounted what for a while seemed
an insurmountable obstacle, it may be said in the true
sense of the word that Riley was a poet. He had a
new conception of his mission. Since his vision, his
attitude had been that of a listener. "In hours of in-
spiration," he said, "I was a lover listening to an utter-
ance that flowed in syllables like dewdrops from the
lips of flowers." The listening attitude was to con-
tinue, but he was not only to listen, he was to

414 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

work. It was one thing to be favored with the gylla-
blesy another and equally important thing to seize
them and record them. They had to be caressed
and polished and occasionally hammered that the
reader might have, in a measure, the sense of beauty
that ravished the poet's heart when he first heard
them. After the syllables had been recorded he had to
set the poem up, and then 'Valk around it/' he said,
''as Benjamin Harrison walked around a law case."
Of a poem that had required a day and a night's effort
he remarked, ''you can track me round it a hundred
times." Poems were his children — good — ^bad — ^in-
different. To curb, train and direct ttiem demanded
the patience of an educator. When in a jocular mood
Riley was wont to call an unfinished poem a "Caira-
wan." At such times he would play the Dwarf in
Christinas Stories to perfection : "Ladies and Gentle-
men," he would say when taking leave of friends to
work on a poem, "the Little Man will now walk three
times around the Cairawan and retire behind the cur-
tain." Thus he sometimes uttered the words on enter-
ing his room at night. The next morning there would
be a new poem on his table.

And here also the reader comes to the exit of the
Little Man in this volume. Having been before the
footlights for a season — ^not from any wish of his own
but in response to the call of his friends — ^he looks
back a moment on the rare pictures of his boyhood and
forward for a glimpse of his future and then makes his
bow and retires behind the curtain.

It is the first year of his "Prolific Decade" and the
last day of the year — 1877. The Little Man is twenty-
eight years old. As his favorite Ik Marvel wrote,
"Clouds were weaving the summer into the seasdii at

WEATHERING THE STORM 415

autumn; and youth was rising: from dashed hopes
into the stature of a man." There being little doubt
among his friends, less in himself, and none in the
mind of the Calm Angel, that he is a poet, he settles
down to his work in Greenfield. The "wanderlust**
calls to him in vain. The past with its cloud and sun-
shine is like a story. In a way, it seems years back to
his vision although it is less than twenty moons. It
was a long way back to the old County Court House
with its Township Library, and the Shoe-Shop where
he received his first impulse to a literary life — farther
yet back to the little willow brook of rhymes that war-
bled through his native town, a score and more years
back to the day in childhood when he and his Uncle
Mart ascended the stream and lifted the curtains on its
winding scenery — a long, tortuous way it was back to
these mile-stones.

At last he has fairly set sail on a literary sea, and
for him that sea has the charms that envelop the mari-
ner on his first voyage to foreign lands. Sky and
atmosphere are brimmed and overflowing. All things
are elate with buoyancy. There is the breath of morn-
ing in the sea air. Before him in the hazy kingdoms
of the unknown are the Fortunate Isles and somewhere
beyond them —

'The shores of an eternity
In the calms of Paradise.''

■ < ■ p •

INDEX

Abbott, Emma, 317.

Adelphian Band, 106.

Adjustable LunaiiCt motif of, 256.

Alcott, Louisa May, 81.

Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, 314.

Alleghany Mountains, 1, 6.

Along the Banks of BrandyuHne^ 63.

Amendment, The, Riley's school paper, 68, 367.

American Patriot, The, 16.

Anderson Democrat, 333, 342, excerpt from, 351-2.

Anderson Mystery, The, 399.

AraUan Nights, 27, 73.

Argonauts of '49, 86.

At Last, 225.

Autumn Leaf, An, 228.

Anecdotes : Benson Out-Bensoned, 356-58 ; Bill at Greenfield Hotel,
216; cake of soap, 26; creditors, 79; Discouraging Model,
124; drowning painter, 149; Dying Soldier, 56-57; end of
Kiley's career as musician, 165; end of Riley's career as
violinist, 178; first boots, 25; first suit of clothes, 182;
grandfather's book, 10; leaving the farm, 69-70;
Leonainie, 368-400; Lily, 49; McCrillus, Dr., engages Riley,
108; Martin Riley runs away, 19; Out to Old Aunt Mary's,
motif, 38 ; Peg Woffington, 260-61 ; picnic of the Adelphians,
166-68; progress of South Bend, 143; Riley, Andrew, sells
com, 7; Riley and Anna Mayflower, 161-63; Riley and the
irate farmer, 132-34 ; Riley as Bible seller, 74 ; Riley as blind
painter, 135-36; Riley as editor of Greenfield Criterion, 66;
Riley as painter of signs and houses, 74-78; Riley as secre-
tary of the Sunday-school, 90; Riley at the bar, 181-88;
Riley's choice of profession, 212 ; Riley's flrst valentine, 223 ;
Riley in Magic Oil Laboratory, 211; Riley's intuition, 244-
45; Riley, McClanahan and Hell, 152; reading Robinson
Crusoe in school, 50-60; Reciting Casabianca, 55; Riley
sends letters and poems to Longfellow, 234-36, 318; Riley
skating, 61; Riley takes his first poem to the Greenfield
Commercial, 221-22; Riley's trip with his father to Indian-
apolis, 58-59 ; side-show at Cadiz, 117 ; Thanksgiving Day at
Henchley's, 359^.

Bailey, Montgomery, 225.
Ballad, A, 224.
Bamett, War, 169.
Bartholomew County, 15.
Battle of LovelVs Pond, 221.
Bedford, Pa., a

419

420 INDEX

Beecher, Henry Wnrd, 303.

Bennon, Luther, 2GG. 356.

Bennon Out-Bensoncd, 152.

Billings, Josh, 172.

Bonny Broum Quail, 63.

Brandywlne Creek, 14, 40, 62.

Brightwood, 335.

British Books, influence on Riley, aS-S.

Brook Bong, 24.

Bull, Ole^ Norwegian violinist, 170-75.

Burlington Hcuckeye, 349.

Cabin Creek. 12, 14.

Cnpt. KIdd, 60.

Chntterton, Thomas, 367.

Child, Lydia Maria. 172.

Child World, The, 31. 150.

Chonte, Joseph H., 125.

Cincinnati, 4.

Clay, Henry, 8.

Clayton, L. H.. 78.

Collyer, Robert, 172, 245, 408.

Cooley, George. 240.

Country Pathicay, A, 233, 366.

Craqueodoom, 339.

Croan, William M., 355, 361, 393.

Crooked Jim, 63.

Curtis, George W., 171.

Danhury Vctcs, 225, 227, 316, 349.

Dave Field, 153.

Delaware Coimty. 10.

Den I son Hotel, 58.

Destiny, A, 22»,

Dickens, Charles. 4, 5, 11. 64. 98, 99, 101, 204-200.

Duck Creek Jabbertoock, 339.

Earlhamite, The, 334.
Edym. 217-218.
Empty Song, An, 298-299.
EtheU. J. W., 145, 384.

Fame: 130; quoted, 236. 807, 320.

Family Friend, 16.

Farmer Whipple^Bachelor, 114-220.

Fitch, John, 284.

Flames and Ashes, 233.

Flaxman, John, 276.

Fletcher. Calvin, 412.

Fragment, quoted, 68.

Frog, The, 39.

Funny Little Fellow, 324.

Fuseli, Henry, 254.

INDEX 421

George, Henry, 314.

George Mullen's ConfessUmt 889.

GUI, W. F., 383.

Golden Girl : letter to Riley about OM Bweetheart of Mine, 267 ;

273, 279, 283-311, 370.
Gooding, Judge David S., 41.
Graphic Company, 132-157.
Graphics, 144, 225.
Oreat Pedee, 17.

Greenfield, 14, 15, 17, 19, 30, 41, 62, 82.

Greenfield Commercial: Riley as a musician, 177; 220, 221, 816.
Greenfield Democrat, 77, 215, 822.
Greenfield Netca, 114, 226, 227.
Greenfield Reveille, 16.
Greenfield Spectator, 16.
Guymon House, 79.

Hancock CJounty, 82.

Happy Bella, 368.

Harris, Lee O.. 52, 62-66. 238, 275, 314, 316, 328.

Harte, Bret, 64, 88 143, 190.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 314.

Hay, John : 5, 50, 160, 226 ; letter to Riley, 282.

Hearth and Home, 229.

Hedley, James, 255.

Henderson, John O., 371-72.

Her Beautiful Hands, quoted, 297.

Hi8 Mother, quoted, 190.

Holland, J. G., 172.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 314.

Hough, Judge William R., 39.

Howells, William Dean, 3, 375.

Hunt, Emily, 14.

// / Knew What Poets Know, 267.

Indiana, 4, 6, 7, 8.

Indianapolis Herald, 48. 234, 277.

Indianapolis Journal, 274.

Indianapolis Mirror, 223.

Indianapolis Sentinel, 172, 275.

Ingersoll, Robert G., 329.

In the Dark, 296.

Ireland, William, 367.

Iron Horse, The, 123.

Irving, Washington : at a lawyer, 183 ; Inflaence on Riley, 90.

Jay Whit, 23, 25, 218.

Jefferson, Joseph, 61.

Joe Biggshy's Proposal, quoted, 165.

Johnny Appleseed, 11, 77.

Johnny, a short story by Riley, 224.

Jordan, Mr& D. M., 878.

422 INDEX

Keefer, Altnon, 34, 86.
Kingry* (SeorRe, 61.
Klnnnrd, William, 361.
Kinney. Contos. 3G3.
Kokomo Di/tpatrh, 371-72.
Kokomo Rrpuhlican, 227.
Krout, Mary H., 268.

Lucy, John W., 66.

Lofnyette, Gen., 8.

La Ice Krio, 4.

Last Waltz, quoted, 168.

Liivater, 2«'>4.

Lcloine, 228.

Lincoln, Abraham, 12. 30, 80, 81, 106.

Lines in a Letter Enrlosinff a Pieturc, quoted, 296.

Little Brandywlnc, OIJ.

Little Nell, 72. JKS, 11)0.

Longfellow, Henry Wadswortli: 10, 33. 05; influence on Riley, 103-

104. 174. 221, 2(«>. 274. 2S2. 310, 314, 315, 310; letter to

Riley, 321, 322, 324, 327-28, 363.
Lost Kiss, The, 2S0.
Lowell, James Russell, 27, 181, 252.

McClanahan, JameB. 108, 145, 288, 30a

McClure Township Library, 91-04.

McCrillua. Dr. S. B., 105-31.

McDowell, liahe, 229.

McCJuffey, William H., 102-03.

McManus, S. B., 149.

Mack, F. II.. 145.

Man of Many Parts, 330.

Man's Devotion, 223.

Marvel, Ik, 229, 233, 246, 414.

Masonic Hall of (JrcK^nfleld, 62.

Mass Convention, 15.

Master Humphrey's Cloek, 6.

Maud Muller, burlesque, 235.

Metcalf, Stephen, 302.

Metropolitan Theatre, 2G0.

Mill, John Stuart, 314.

Millikan, Rhoda Ilouphton. 90-91, 218, 239.

Mississlnewa River, 9-11, 121-22. 234.

Mitchell. Donald G.. 316.

Mitchell, S. Weir, 255.

Mockery, 223

Moonlight in the Forest, 63.

Moreland, George, influence upon Riley, 154-55.

Morton, Oliver P., 30.

Mountains of the Moon, 3.

Myers, Eudora Kate. 403.

INDEX 423

Myers. Jessie F., SOS,

Myers, Capt W. R., 360.

My Jolly Friend's Secret, 225.

National Hotel, 16.

National Road, 31, 50, 86, 160.

Neghborly Poems, 354.

Neill. Mrs. Frances, 85.

Newcastle, 82.

Neiccastle Mercury, 833.

New Garden, 9.

Now We Can Sleep, Mother, 837.

Nursery Rhymes for Children, 128.

Nye, BiU, 53, 188, 233.

Old Fashioned Roses, 326.

Old Sweetheart of Mine, 267.

Old Swimmin' Hole, 77, 80.

Old Wish, motif, 161.

Orlie Wild, 369.

Out to Old Aunt Mary's, 38.

Overland Route, The, 87.

Over the HiUs to the Poor Farm, 355.

Pamona, 11.

Parker, B. S., 265, 323.

Pence, John W., 399.

Peter Bell, 61.

Philiper Flash, 218-19.

Phillips, Charles, 387.

Phillips, Wendell, 172.

Plerson. William M., 66.

Pioneer Days : activities, 5 ; characteristics of people, 1-6 ; food, 7 ;

land conditions, 2-3 ; philosophy of the pioneer, 4.
Plain Sermons, 225.
Plank Road, 19.
Poet's Realm, 217.
PoeVs Wooing, 223, 225.
Post-Oazette, 221.

Queen City, 8.
Queen Victoria, 8.

Randolph County. 6, 7, 9, 10.

Railway Ouide, 401.

Reed, Myron, 61, 70, 95, 218, 248, 269, 271, 278, 274, 817, 866, 890,

411.
Rhymes of Childhood, 354.
Richards, Samuel, 360, 384.
Richmond Independent, 334.
Rldgevllle, 9.
Riley: family, 6-9. Mother, Elizabeth Marine, 5, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12;

character, 13; marriage, 14, 16, 17, 21; death, 71; Influence

424 INDEX

on Riley, 72-73. Father, Renbon Riley, 0; description, 12;
13, 15, 17, 20; In politics, 30; at war, 79, 105-07; ambition
for J. W., 181-82. Grandfather, Andrew Riley, 7. Grand-
mother, l^Iargaret Sleek Riley, 6, 10. Brothers and sisters:
Elva May Riley. 32; Humboldt Alexander Riley, 82; John
Andrew Riley, 81 ; Martha Celestla Riley, 81 ; Mary Ellxa-
beth Riley, 32. Uncle Martin Riley, 21, 22, 23, 24, 26, 28; In-
fluence on Riley's Imagination, 34, 80, 87. Marine ancestry :
occupation, 9 ; Rrnndfather, John Marine, 8, 9 ; grandmother,
Fonny Jones Marine, 9, 11, 13. James Whltcomb Ril^:
birth, 21; association with Dr. McCrillus, 108; association
with Home Sowing Machine Co., 148; association with Wia-
ard Oil Co., 103-215 : description of Riley by J. B. Townsend,
212-14 ; education, 33-38, 30, 42, SO-58, 60-07 ; early reading,
90; 103; enters law, 188; enters newspaper business, 227; on
friendship. 250; growth in imagination, 28; In poetic spirit,
203-10; influence of Forty-Nlners on Riley, 87-89; love of
nature, 40-47, 50, 61 ; love of music, 159, 170; as lawyer, 181-
192; as musician, 158-180; philosophy In early life, 84-87;
publishes flrst poem. 68; on private theatricals, 226; Riley,
McCIaniihan Advertising Co., 132; Riley*fl yision, 272.

Tiipeat Peach i8 on the Uigheai Tree^ 218.

Robinson Crusoe, 59.

Roclcingham, N. C, 8.

Romney, 207.

Rushville, 74.

Bame Old Fftory Told Again, quoted, 220.

Saxhorn Band, 159.

Bay FarciccH and Lei Ife Oo, 308.

Bay Bomcthing to Me, 298.

Bchoolhoy BUhouettes, 48, 51, 59.

Schoolmaster and Songmaster, 62.

Scott, Sir Walter, 6, 64.

Shelbyville. 82.

Bhoicer, The, 233. 274.

Bilcnt Victors, 295. 353.

Singing PilgHmn, The, 209-10.

Skinner, J. J.. 197.

Snow, Tom, 70, 96-102.

Borne Observations on Decoration Day, 353.

Bong of Parting, 298.

Spencer, Herbert, 35.

Stedman, Edmund Clarence, .SS4.

Stockford and Blowncy Co., 143.

Stony Creek, 7. 12, 14.

Btory of Life in the Woods, 45.

Strange Young Man, motif, 87, 186.

Bummer Afternoon, 225.

Swing, David, 80.

Tallholt, 79.

INDEX 425

Tales of the Ocean, 34.

Tanglewood Tales, influence on Riley, 87.

Tennyson, Alfred, 13.

Test of Love, 339.

Thanksgiving Day at Henchley's, quoted, 359.

Tharpe's Pond, 24, 45, 81,

That Little Dorg, 225.

Thompson, Maurice, 315.

Thomburg, William A., 10.

TUt the Cup, quoted, 169.

Tom Johnson's Quit, 155.

To the Judge, 185.

Townsend, James B., 212-14.

Tradin* Joe, 226.

Transfigured, quoted, 72.

Tress of Hair, 298.

Trillpipe's Boy on Spiders, 339.

Tune, quoted, 158,

Twain, Mark, 4, 58, 62, 70, 81, 88, 125, 172, 314, 412.

Unau:angaica%oa, 339.
Union City, 197.
Unlonport, 14.
Upper Sandusky, 204-05.

Vision of Summer, quoted, 274, 324.

Walden Pond, 45.

Walton, Ike, 274.

Wash Lowry's Reminiscence, 339.

Watterson, Henry, 353.

Wayne CJounty, 9.

When My Dreams Come True, 294.

Whitcomb, James, 21, 30.

White Man's Flood, 1, 5.

Whitmore, Mrs. H. E., 127.

Whitmore, James, 145.

Wilfer, Rumty, 69.

Willard, Archibald, painter, 83.

Willie, or Prior to Miss Beliefs Appearance, 354.

Windsor, 12.

Wordsworth, 27.

WrangdUliont 33a

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