"And what'd you do with the body?" he asked. "I dug a grave in the shine of the moon," she answered. "And I put it in by the two little cold grey feet----" This touch of the grey feet laid a spell on Deasey's hankering morbidity. "_What turned the feet grey_?" he whispered. "Nature, I s'pose!" replied the white-haired widow. She drew her shawl about her shrinking form before she turned away. "'Twas never found out, from that hour to this, who done it!" muttered the Widow Geraghty, "but, may the Divvle skelp me if I touch one drop of chucken-tea again!" THE BIRTH OF A MASTERPIECE By LUCAS MALET (From The _Story-Teller_) 1922 Looking back on it from this distance of time--it began in the early and ended in the middle eighties--I see the charm of ingenuous youth stamped on the episode, the touching glamour of limitless faith and expectation. We were, the whole little band of us, so deliciously self-sufficient, so magnificently critical of established reputations in contemporary letters and art. We sniffed and snorted, noses in air, at popular idols, while ourselves weighted down with a cargo of guileless enthusiasm only asking opportunity to dump itself at an idol's feet. We ached to burn incense before the altar of some divinity; but it must be a divinity of our own discovering, our own choosing. We scorned to acclaim ready-made, second-hand goods. Then we encountered Pogson--Heber Pogson. Our fate, and even more, perhaps, his fate, was henceforth sealed. He was a large, sleek, pink creature, slow and rare of movement, from much sitting bulky, not to say squashy, in figure, mild-eyed, slyly jovial and--for no other word, to my mind, so closely fits his attitude--resigned. A positive glutton of books, he read as instinctively, almost as unconsciously, as other men breathe. But he not only absorbed. He gave forth and that copiously, with taste, with discrimination, now and again with startlingly eloquent flights and witty sallies. His memory was prodigious. The variety and vivacity of his conversation, the immense range of subjects he brilliantly laboured, when in the vein, remain with me as simply marvellous. With us he mostly was in the vein. And, vanity apart, we must have composed a delightful audience, generously censer-swinging. No man of even average feeling but would be moved by such fresh, such spontaneous admiration! Thus, if our divinity melodiously piped, we did very radiantly dance to his piping.