"No!" snarled the apostate Santa Claus. "And I ain't likely to make no sech v'y'ge this weather." CHAPTER XIII FAIR AND FOUL WEATHER Among other new worlds, that of poetry was being revealed to Pearl Holden. Although by no means sentimental, Joe Helmford had his bookshelves well supplied with the standard poets, as well as with the works of many of the minor versifiers. "I do dearly love rhymes," Pearl said, and so Helmford pointed out these volumes to her. She began to learn that romance lay in other directions besides on the road of fiction. "My!" she confessed to Helmford one evening, when she stopped in at his room on the way to her own for a book to read by the light of the small hand lamp Sarah Petty allowed her. "My! some of these pieces of poetry I read sound like chiming bells, and some flow sweet as honey. Some of the lines that I don't half understand, Mr. Helmford, thrill me through and through." He watched her with something other than amusement behind his big, round glasses. Here was the budding of a soul into new life. Helmford began dimly to realize that Pearl was no ordinary girl after all. Had she been born in a different environment she would have eagerly absorbed such learning and culture as might have been within her reach. "Some of 'em," Pearl went on to confess, "I guess I don't understand at all. I used to think all poetry must rhyme. You know, two lines ending with the same sound was all that made poetry, I thought," and she laughed. "There must be a thought even in two rhyming lines to make poetry," Helmford suggested, gently smiling. "Ain't it so?" she rejoined. "And some of these poets don't use rhyme at all. Here's this one. He puzzled me at first." She seized a volume and opened it with a familiarity which plainly showed she had been browsing in it before. "First I didn't know what to make of him. I read about 'When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd' and somehow I couldn't make it sound like poetry. Yet parts of it just made me shiver--just the reading of 'em." Helmford nodded appreciatively. "That was even before I knew the piece was about Abraham Lincoln and the passing of his funeral train through the country. That must have been wonderful!" "It was wonderful," agreed the young man. "And it is wonderful how Whitman could touch the heartstrings without the tricks of rhyme or of alliteration." "But it is--just--poetry?" slowly queried the girl. "Are the Psalms poetry?" he began, quite as eagerly interested as she was now. "See! The man's style is based on them." He read, and with expression: "'Now while I sat in the day and look'd forth, In the close of the day with its light and the fields of spring, and the farmers preparing their crops, In the large unconscious scenery of my land with its lakes and forests, In the heavenly aerial beauty (after the perturb'd winds and the storms),