“There is no poetry in life to-day!” We were walking down Euclid Avenue, and my friend had been expressing her hot disapproval of many things in this really excellent world of ours, ending with that youthfully positive assertion: “There is no poetry in life to-day!” I mildly suggested that she might not recognize it as poetry, if she saw it, as poems were not always bound in white and silver nor yet in blue and gold--some, indeed, never reaching the honor (?) of binding at all. By the fierceness of her contempt for the opinion of another, one could easily measure her utter inexperience, but she finally closed her address by haughtily informing me that she was not to be deceived by “bindings”--that all poetry was sacred to her, whether she found it in the polished, metrical form of verse, or simply expressing itself in human action--but in these days there was no poetry--conscious or unconscious--for--she got no further; my fingers were on her wrist in that unintentionally savage clutch that never fails to secure immediate attention and later remembrance--and I was whispering: “Look! Look well! at the old man approaching!” I’m sure, though, she needed no such reminder--no one could help looking at him--and, at first glance, only his snowy hair kept the laugh from one’s lips. A well-grown boy of twelve would have been “mad as a hopper” if he had not stood, at least, even in height with this old, old man. His gait was half-trot, half-shuffling walk, and his speed remarkable--but little as he was, he leant forward in a peculiar way. His nationality, after fifty-five unbroken years in America, was stamped so clearly on face and figure that his tongue’s thick, disobedient English was not needed to proclaim him an ancient Dutchman. His garments would have wrung laughter from a telegraph pole--the saddest thing on earth. That his wife made his trousers there could be no doubt, for if you looked at _them_ only, you could never tell which way the man was going to walk. Then, short as his little legs were, his trouser-legs were still shorter, while he could have stowed away quite a nice, little outfit in that portion of them known as the “slack.” This breadth of beam and shortness of keel gave to the public gaze a generous margin of clean, white stocking. His collar, which was an integral part of his shirt--and not, to use his own words, “a flimsy-flamsy yump-a-bout-ting what wont stay hitched!”--was of immaculate whiteness, but utterly innocent of starch, and on his venerable head he wore an antique, “panama” hat. A Dutch friend, who cultivated coffee, had picked this “panama” in Java, when it was green--so to speak--and sent it here, and the older citizens had, for twenty-odd years, watched its slow ripening under the American sun--and in its wearer’s eyes it had just reached its prime. Before the quaint, little body reached us, I whispered: “It is not poverty that makes him dress like that--he owns the big ‘Buckeye Block,’ besides his