, because one little green leaf has budded out, for a plant to
say that it would not be kept growing in the ground any longer. I
couldn't go and set up a poem-factory, without a home and a living
for the poems to grow up out of. I'm pleased I can write!" she
exclaimed, brimming up suddenly with the pleasure she had but half
stopped to realize. "I _thought_ I could. But I know very well that
the best and brightest things I've ever thought have come into my
head over the ironing-board or the bread-making. Even at home. And
_here_,--why, Mrs. Scherman, it's _living_ in a poem here! And if
you can be in the very foundation part of such living, you're in the
realest place of all, I think. I don't believe poetry can be skimmed
off the top, till it has risen up from the bottom!"

"But you _ought_ to come into my parlor, among my friends! People
would be glad to get you into their parlors, by and by, when you
have made the name you can make. I've no business to keep you down.
And you don't know yourself. You won't stay."

"Just please wait and see," said Bel. "I haven't a great deal of
experience in going about in parlors; but I don't think I should
much like it,--_that_ way. I'd rather keep on being the woman that
made the name, than to run round airing it. I guess it would keep
better."

"I see I can't advise you. I shouldn't dare to meddle with
inspirations. But I'm proud, and glad, Bel; and you're my friend!
The rest will all work out right, somehow."

"Thank you, dear Mrs. Scherman," said Bel, her voice full of
feeling. "And--if you please--will you have the grouse broiled
to-day, or roasted with bread-sauce?"

At that, the two young women laughed out, in each other's faces.

Bel stopped first.

"It isn't half so funny as it sounds," she said. "It's part of the
poetry; the rhyme's inside; it is to everything. We're human people:
that's the way we get it."

And Bel went away, and stuffed the grouse, and grated her
bread-crumbs, and sang over her work,--not out loud with her lips,
but over and over to a merry measure in her mind,--

"Everything comes to its luck some day:
I've got chickens! What will folks say?"

"I'm solving more than I set out to do," Sin Scherman said to her
husband. "Westover was nothing to it. I know one thing, though, that
I'll do next."

"_One_ thing is reasonable," said Frank. "What is it?"

"Take her to York with us, this summer. Row out on the river with
her. S