The writer of the football stories threw up his hands in disgust. It was evident he also felt something I had often felt. One learns to write a little and then comes this temptation to do tricks with words. The people who should catch us at our tricks are of no avail. Bill Hart, the two-gun man of the movies, who goes creeping through forests, riding pell-mell down hillsides, shooting his guns bang-bang, would be arrested and put out of the way if he did that at Billings, Montana, but do you suppose the people of Billings laugh at his pranks? Not at all. Eagerly they go to see him. Cowboys from distant towns ride to where they may see his pictures. For the cowboy also the past has become a flaming thing. Forgotten are the long dull days of following foolish cows across an empty desert place. Aha, the cowboy also wants to believe. Do you not suppose Bill Hart also wants to believe? The deuce of it all is that, wanting to believe the lie, one shuts out the truth, too. The man by the fence, looking at the New England garden, could not become brother to the writer of football stories. “_They tell themselves so many little lies, my beloved._” VI I was sliding across the room now, thinking of the man whose wife had run away with his friend. I was thinking of him and of something else at the same time. I wanted to save my Balzac if I could. Already the football-story man had torn a page of the book. Were he to get excited again he might tear out more pages. When he had first come into my room I had been discourteous, standing and staring at him, and now I did not want to speak of the book, to warn him. I wanted to pick it up casually when he wasn’t looking. “I’ll walk across the room with it and put it out of his reach,” I thought but just as I was about to put out my hand he put out his hand and took it again. And now as he fingered the book nervously his mind jumped off in a new direction. He told me that during the Summer before he had got hold of a book of verses by an American poet, Carl Sandburg. “There’s a fellow,” he cried, waving my Balzac about. “He feels common things as I would like to be able to feel them and sometimes as I work in my garden I think of him. As I walk about in my town or go swimming or fishing in the Summer afternoons I think of him.” He quoted: “_Such a beautiful pail of fish, such a beautiful peck of apples, I cannot bring you now. It is too early and I am not footloose yet._” It was pretty evident the man’s mind was jerking about, flying from place to place. Now he had forgotten the man who on Summer days came to lean over his fence and was speaking of other people of his New England town. On Summer mornings he sometimes went to loiter about on the main street of the town of his adoption, and there were things always going on that caught his fancy, as flies are caught in molasses.