“I have an idea that most of the tramps and vagabonds of our country-sides have had lives full of poetry. The men who are dismissed as eccentrics were often mystics. America has not liked its Thoreaus and its Chapmans.... Johnny Appleseed, for instance, who was an American St. Francis, has been generally laughed at as a sort of a harmless lunatic.” We talked of this on the upward trail next day. One point in favour of the hotel had been its good supply of canvas trousers. I bought myself a pair, and was thereby saved the reproach of looking a little like Johnny Appleseed in the matter of my attire. I laughed at Johnny for having worn a tin can on his head for a hat, and Vachel was at pains to defend him even there. But the poetry of his life was his going ahead of the pioneers of Ohio and Indiana, and planting apple-orchards and tending them and watching them grow for the America that should come after him. I often wonder whether the large red-gleaming Ohio apples of to-day do not come from him. I’ve stolen them and munched them at dawn, as I tramped to the West, and I can testify how good they were--good medicine. “And so for us he made great medicine,” says the poet reverently, quoting his own new poem. Vachel in his quest for beauty was regarded by many as a crank, an eccentric. He endured the humiliation of being village-idiot, or, as they call it in the Middle West, “town-boob.” Awfully silly people who thought themselves smart would stop in front of him with the air of a Johnny Walker whisky advertisement and ask him quizzically if he were “still going strong.” He was discovered later, and hailed and acclaimed by the poets of America and England, but even then the dulled folk of business and politics looked doubtfully upon him. He told me, for instance, how a celebrated impresario introduced him to the notables of the capital, but always with the formula-- “I want to introduce you to Mr. Vachel Lindsay of Springfield, Illinois.... He is a pp--oet.” So there’s a streak of sadness somewhere in the poet’s mind, and it comes from brother-man. And that sadness has expressed itself in a love of Johnny Appleseed and all others whom the Spirit drives into the wilderness. * * * * *