“Miss Hastings showed me. The rest sort of always came easy to me.” “Then what the hell are you doin’ workin’ here in my place, when you got book-learnin’ like that?” “My father makes me.” “He must be a dog-gone bigger fool than I allus took him for. Say that book-learnin’ over!” Nathan complied. “Now what does it mean in plain Vermont jaw-music?” Nathan was beginning to forget his dizziness. “It means that to make poetry read smoothly the lines in each verse must have exactly the same number of syllables. They must be emphasized in the same way in the same place in all the verses and yet give perfect emphasis. You’ve just got a lot of lines here with the final words rhyming.” “But you said it didn’t say anything!” Caleb was not angry so much as hurt, grievously hurt. “I allus thought it said a lot,” he added, with a little catch in his voice. “I mean something really fine and beautiful and rare different from the ordinary way we write or think or talk, if you understand what I mean. For instance, you say in your first line that somebody’s eyes are like the stars and his voice——” “_Her_ voice!” corrected old Caleb. “—Her voice is like the dew. Well, that doesn’t really mean anything. Nobody ever saw a woman with eyes like actual stars or a voice like real dew, because dew doesn’t make any noise, anyhow, let alone having a voice. Poetry tries to say things better and softer and finer than any one has ever said ’em before and that’s where you’ve fallen down.” “How would you say it?” Caleb had come across, sunk down into the creaky chair with his knees parted, his bulbous finger tips pressed together between them, the world and business forgot,—a gray-haired man seeking pointers in rhyming from a minstrel with a bashed head. “Well, what you want to express is that you sat on a hilltop thinking of a woman. And somehow the night was so soft and wonderful you couldn’t help comparing her with the view around you. So suppose instead of saying you sat on the hill and thought of the woman having star-like eyes, you looked off to some star, the prettiest, brightest of them all. And her face seemed to come before you in it—Say, who is this woman, anyhow?” Nathan broke off suddenly. Old Caleb’s gaze dropped to his horny hands. He stopped chewing. “Once on a time, bub—once on a time—back in my life—there was a girl. Well—I loved her—and so—I writ this poetry.” It seemed to the awe-struck boy as though a section of the universe slid back then and disclosed the mighty works which make the worlds go around. Old Caleb Gridley, rich—as the village phrased it—“beyond dreams of avarice”, hard-cider drinker, leading selectman and poker-player Saturday nights under Jimmy Styles’ barber shop—most of all her father!—once upon a time old Caleb Gridley had been as other boys and men, even as Nathan. He had loved a girl and sought balm in hexameters.