d from which I had heard intoned "cometh
help," "give me dirt to work in somewhere except in just a yard if I
can't have Sam's. Help me to get somebody to help me to raise things for
people to eat and milk, as well as to inspire a play. I'll do both
things, but I must have earth with rotted leaves in it. Amen."

Then I went to bed heartbroken for life, and my sad eyes closed on the
little glimpse which my window framed of Old Harpeth, the tallest hill
in Paradise Ridge, while my hand still folded in the moist hollyhock
seeds.

II

THE BOOK OF SHELTER

Peter's play is remarkable; it really is. He has collected all the great
and wonderful things that life in America contains and put them together
in a way that reads as if Edgar Allan Poe had helped Henry James to
construct it, though they had forgotten to ask Mark Twain to dinner and
had never heard of John Burroughs. I felt when I got through the first
act as if I had been living for a week shut into an old Gothic cathedral
aisle decorated by marble-carved inspired words, and I was both cold and
hungry. The more I read of Peter's play the more congenial I felt with
Farrington. I had enough education to see that it was a genuine literary
achievement, but I had heart enough to know that something had to be
done to rescue all his characters from the arctic region. Could I do it
single-handed even for a person I cared as much for as I did for Peter?
I decided that I could not, and that the only way I could prove my
loyalty and affection for Peter was to abase myself before Sam
Crittenden and his cruelty to me, and get his help. Only for Peter would
I have done such a thing, which in the end I didn't have to do at all.

Since the night Sam refused me the use of his farm and put me out of his
life for ever I had not seen him until by his own intention. Or maybe it
was Tolly's.

"See here, Betty, what you need is a good fox or tango and you had
better come to it up at Sue's to-night."

Tolly had broken in upon my despairing meditations over the way in which
Peter's hero talks wicked business and congested charity to the poor
little heroine in the very first act while she is full of a beautiful
affection Peter didn't seem to see, and ready to pour it forth to the
hero before he started out on a long life mission. Maybe it was
sorrowing with her at being thus suppressed by everybody that made me
write her case to Peter with such fervor. I had just finished the let