My first night's shelter was in a leaky outhouse. The farmstead to which it belonged had burned down. I might have been taken in at any number of places, but my access of timidity was too great ... it might on the following dawn be followed by as great an effrontery. My year in college had disorganized me, pulled me out of my tramp character. It was no more a usual thing to beg or ask for shelter. I could not sleep. My muscles were already overstrained from the excessive effort of struggling along in the tenacious mud, like a fly escaping from the edge of spilled molasses. I had brought a box of small candles for just such an emergency. I lit one after the other, sat on the seat, and read Keats all night ... in an ecstasy, forgetting my surroundings, my pitiful poverty, my pilgrimage that would seem ridiculous to most. The rain increased. Outside it drummed and drummed. Inside it dripped and dripped. And as I sat there, upright, to escape the drip from the leaks, I climbed to a high, crystal-clear state of spirit. Again I burned through Keats' life as if remembering that it was what I had myself suffered ... as if suddenly I awoke to the realisation that _I_ was Keats, re-born in America, a tramp-student in Kansas.... And now Severn, my true, faithful friend, was with me.... Severn, who had given up his career as painter to be near me in my last days ... we were on the _Maria Crowther_ ... we were still off the coast of England, and I had gone ashore for the last touching of my foot on English soil.... There hung the great, translucent star of evening, at that hushed moment of twilight, before any other of the stars had come forth.... "Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art-- Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night, And watching, with eternal lids apart, Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite, The moving waters at their priestlike task Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,..." The evening star made me dream of immortality and love--my love for Fanny Brawne.... Now we, Severn and I, were journeying across the country to Rome ... voyaging, rather, through fields of flowers ... like my procession of Bacchus in _Endymion_ ... that was a big poem, after all.... Now the fountain played under the window ... where I was to die.... "Severn, I feel the daisies growing over me." "Severn, I--I--Severn ... I am dying ... Severn, lift me up--I--" "Here lies one whose fame was writ in water." (How they cruelly laughed at that--for a time!) * * * * * I gave a start, almost a scream of agony ... the candle, somehow, had served me a ghastly trick ... it had cast my shadow backward on the wall, like that shadow cast by the head of the dying poet, as Severn had sketched it.... I ran my hand over my face ... it was hollow and tight-drawn like the face of a consumptive.