With an automatic obedience which neither sought to comprehend nor to control, Dodson’s hands dived into the recesses of his overcoat. Therefrom they produced a reporter’s notebook, half-full of a hasty and clumsy pencil scrawl. This he gave to the old man. “It begins here,” he said, indicating the place in an urgent whisper. “It is not very clear, but I hadn’t much time. Can you make it out? Read it as quickly as ever you can, and then perhaps he will not notice that it is not all that it might be.” “Begin, O my father!” said the gentle voice of the dying man. Immediately the thin, high, quavering tones of the old man began to read. At his first words the figure beside the hearth seemed to uplift his head, and to strain all his senses; the glazed and sightless eyes were enkindled; a strange rapture played about the parted lips. Dodson listened in a kind of dull terror. He dared not look at the face of the poet, nor yet at that of him who read. As he sat in impotence midway between the two, with fire and ice in his veins, he could not follow the words that proceeded from the old man’s lips. At last it was borne in upon him that a miracle had been wrought. The white-haired, feeble, half-blind old creature was not crooning his own crude pencilled phrases, which he knew to be so inept that he felt them to be a blasphemous mockery. That which proceeded from the lips of this aged man was couched in terms of wisdom and beauty. It began by setting forth briefly the place of the world-poet in the hierarchy of mankind, which was consonant with mankind’s own place in the hierarchy of nature. It indicated briefly the scope and status of the world-poet; and in a short, powerful, lucid argument it proceeded to add another to the group which time was constantly conspiring to limit. It indicated that which went to the making of a world-poet; a thousand years of prayer and vigil; of unceasing strife against the things that were. It indicated what the world-poet was in essence and in substance; how he transcended all men in their several stations because he was as they were themselves, yet by his power of vision rendered infinitely more; how this divine manifestation of the truth that all the world was kin, was a doctor, a lawyer, a soldier, a teacher, a statesman, a tiller of the earth, a peruser of books.