So the farmer had his pain-killer, but he did not eat any supper, and the poet and the rest of the gang as they came went gaily on and ate to the end. “I began with each man as he came in and ate him down,” says my hungry companion suggestively. “And the farmer, tasting nothing, had to wait till all were through to say the final grace. We finished at last and went all of us to the barns to sleep till Monday morning and the hour when we returned again to the golden line.” _The kiss by hopeless fancy feigned On lips that are for others, Does not compare with the imaginary meal You eat when the wallet is empty. The kiss too, when you get it, Oft proves a disillusion; But the first meal after an involuntary fast, Well! It takes a real poet to describe that!_ [Illustration] X. CLEAR BLUE AFTER telling me how he “ate down” the farmer, Vachel rested and passed into a halcyon mood. We had a heavenly day climbing towards a heaven of unclouded blue. Swinburne flowed more naturally from the poet’s lips than conversation: Before the beginning of years There came to the making of man Time with a gift of tears, Grief with a glass that ran. His thought soared with our steps. As the sea gives her shells to the shingle The earth gives her streams to the sea, he declaimed to the streams. I promised to arrange a Swinburne recital for him next time he came to England. For I soon found that he knew as much Swinburne by heart as he did of his own poetry. Ellery Sedgwick wrote me from Boston that to tramp with a poet would be “Some punkins,” and one may say it was when the poet all day long was a living fountain of verse. I had but to mention a poem and Lindsay poured it forth to the skies. We bathed in a waterfall in the heat of noon, which was also a Swinburnian joy, and we splashed in melting snow whilst our shoulders were burned by the sun and inured ourselves to sun and ice. The sun literally blistered the skin, and we reclined in it on scarlet shelving rocks and cooked our luncheon. All the while Vachel recited Swinburne’s “Ode to Athens,” addressing the walls of a great mountain cirque which drooped in snow curtains and hanging gardens of silver water. Up there came to us after lunch a yellowish-grey animal with sprawling hind legs and stupid benevolent snout and whistled at us--_fee-fo, fee-fo_,--a whistling marmot. As I tried to approach him he snuggled off to the snow-field whence he had come, disappeared under the crust, and presently reappeared from a hole in the midst of the snow and began chasing chipmunks in and out of the snow holes. * * * * *