me."

In this article which I wrote for _McClure's_, I made comment on the
essential mystery of the poet's art, a conjury which is able to
transmute a perfectly commonplace landscape into something fine and
mellow and sweet; for the region in which Riley spent his youth, and
from which he derived most of his later material, was to me a depressing
land, a country without a hill, a river or a lake; a commonplace
country, flat, unkempt and without a line of beauty, and yet from these
rude fields and simple gardens the singer had drawn the sweetest honey
of song, song with a tang in it, like the odor of ripe buckwheat and the
taste of frost-bit persimmons. It reinforced my resolution that the
mid-land was about to blossom into art.

In travel and in work such as this and in pleasant intercourse with the
painters, sculptors, and writers of Chicago my first winter in the
desolate, drab, and tumultuous city passed swiftly and on the whole
profitably, I no longer looked backward to Boston, but as the first warm
spring-winds began to blow, my thoughts turned towards my newly-acquired
homestead and the old mother who was awaiting me there.

Eager to start certain improvements which should tend to make the house
more nearly the kind of dwelling place I had promised myself it should
become, hungry for the soil, rejoicing in the thought of once more
planting and building, I took the train for the North with all my summer
ward-robe and most of my manuscripts, with no intention of reentering
the city till October at the earliest.

CHAPTER TWO

I Return to the Saddle

To pass from the crowds, the smoke and the iron clangor of Chicago into
the clear April air of West Salem was a celestial change for me. For
many years the clock of my seasons had been stilled. The coming of the
birds, the budding of the leaves, the serial blossoming of spring had
not touched me, and as I walked up the street that exquisite morning, a
reminiscent ecstasy filled my heart. The laughter of the robins, the
shrill ki-ki-ki of the golden-wing woodpeckers, and the wistful whistle
of the lark, brought back my youth, my happiest youth, and when my
mother met me at the door it seemed that all my cares and all my years
of city life had fallen from me.

"Well, here I am!" I called, "ready for the spring's work."

With a silent laugh, as preface, she replied, "You'll get a-plenty. Your
father is all packed, impatient to leave for Ordway."

The old