He drew my story out of me,--the story of my life, in fact, before the afternoon wore to dusk. * * * * * "Do you think I'm crazy?" I asked him. "No ... far from it ... " adding gently, with a smile, "sometimes an awful fool, though, Johnnie--if I may say it." * * * * * "Won't you stay overnight?" "No, thanks just the same, 'Perfesser.'" "I have room enough ... better hang around a few days and look for a job here." "It's too near Haberford." "But I know you'd take a couple of fresh books, if I gave them to you, now wouldn't you?" My eyes lit up as with hunger. "This Milton and Sterne are too used-up to be worth a nickel a-piece. Maybe, if I'd keep them, they might be worth something, some day, when you're famous," he joked. "If you want to give me a couple of books ... how about this Keats and this Ossian? I want the Keats for myself. It will renew my courage. And--the Ossian--will you mail that book on for me, to Eos, to old Pfeiler?" I had told him, in the course of my talking, about them both. Pfeiler used often to talk of the greatness of Ossian's poetry ... and how he'd like to possess a volume of it again ... that is, before he grew to hate me. Maybe if I sent him the book, with a letter, he would think less harshly of me. * * * * * I tramped through New England. My whole life had settled back into tramping ... only my Keats remained. I read and re-read his poems, not caring to write a line myself. * * * * * I worked as a dish-washer or pearl-diver for several weeks in Boston, and bought a very cheap second-hand suit. I shifted my mind like a weather vane and decided against shipping to England, with the forlorn hope of, somehow attending Oxford or Cambridge, and studying English literature there. My old ideal of being a great adventurer and traveller had vanished, and, in its stead, came the desire to live a quiet life, devoted entirely to writing poetry, as the poet Gray lived his. * * * * * I drifted inland to Concord, a-foot, as a pilgrim to the town where Emerson and Thoreau had lived. I was happy in loitering about the haunts of Thoreau; in sitting, full of thought, by the unhewn granite tombstone of Emerson, near the quiet of his grave. Toward evening I realised that I had gone without food all day.... On a hill mounting up toward the West, outside of Concord, I stopped at the house of a market-gardener and asked for something to eat. A tottering old man leaned forward through the half-open door. He asked me in, and set before me a plate of lukewarm beans and a piece of jelly roll. But he delighted the tramp in me by setting before me, also, a cup of excellent, hot, strong coffee. Afterward when he asked me if I wanted a job, I said yes. The old man lit my way upstairs to a bed in the attic. It was hardly dawn when he woke me....