t all our forefathers and foremothers have done it before us. The
Hayesboro resurrection will be held right there, I feel sure.

And if mail-time is fun usually, it is great when all the news is about
you and your friends all swarm around you with interest. Everybody had
heard about Peter and his play, though neither Edith nor Tolly thought
they had told, and that he was soon coming down to visit me, and, of
course, that meant to visit all of Hayesboro. Miss Henrietta Spain, who
teaches literature from spelling to the English poets, in the Hayesboro
Academy, had read Peter's new poem--the one the _Literary Opinion_ had
copied last month--and she was pink with excitement over the prospect of
having such a genius in our midst,

"Look out that you don't get put in the play on the other side of the
footlights, Hayes," said the mayor, slapping daddy on the back. "Be
careful how you have a poet sitting around your house."

"The South has long waited to have a genius come down and write a
fitting epic about her Homeric drama of Civil War, Elizabeth," said old
Colonel Menefee. "Let your young friend come, and I can give him
material, beginning with that Bedford Forest charge just before
Chickamauga that--"

"And just remember," interrupted Mrs. Winston Polk, "how Elizabeth's
mother, Betty's own Grandmother Nelson, rode fifty miles and back in
twenty-four hours to get Morgan to send wagons for her barnful of corn
to feed his soldiers, though she and her negroes were dependent on what
she could grow between then and frost. She never faltered, but--"

"The Nashville and Louisville papers all wrote up the way Clyde Tolbot
swam Salt River and stopped the L. & N. express from going down in the
cut during the storm last year," Edith hastened to say when Mrs. Folk's
breath had given out. Tolly's ugly good face was beautiful to see when
she spoke of him thus, though Edith didn't notice it.

When you start a Harpeth Valley town to telling how wonderful it is to
the third and fourth generation back, it is like a seething torrent and
can go on for ever. I glowed to think of all the wonderful things I
could write Peter, and we all started home from the post-office as late
as supper hour would admit.

After I got home, escorted by the reunited Edith and Tolly, as well as
by Billy Robertson, who wants to be Peter's hero, though he wasn't
directly saying so, I sat down determinedly to write to Peter at
inspiring length and make him feel