?"

The old man, he gets red all over his face, and up into the roots of
his white hair, and down into his white beard, and makes believe he is a
little mad at the old lady fur showing him off that-a-way.

"Mother," he says, "yo' shouldn't have done that!" They had had a boy
years before, and he had died, but he always called her mother the same
as if the boy was living. He goes into the house and gets his pipe,
and brings it out and lights it, acting like that book of poetry was
a mighty small matter to him. But he looks at Doctor Kirby out of
the corner of his eyes, and can't keep from getting sort of eager and
trembly with his pipe; and I could see he was really anxious over what
the doctor was thinking of them poems he wrote. The doctor reads some of
'em out loud.

Well, it was kind of home-made poetry, Old Daddy Withers's was. It
wasn't like no other poetry I ever struck. And I could tell the doctor
was thinking the same about it. It sounded somehow like it hadn't been
jointed together right. You would keep listening fur it to rhyme, and
get all worked up watching and waiting fur it to, and make bets with
yourself whether it would rhyme or it wouldn't. And then it ginerally
wouldn't. I never hearn such poetry to get a person's expectances all
worked up, and then go back on 'em. But if you could of told what it was
all about, you wouldn't of minded that so much. Not that you can tell
what most poetry is about, but you don't care so long as it keeps
hopping along lively. What you want in poetry to make her sound good,
according to my way of thinking, is to make her jump lively, and
then stop with a bang on the rhymes. But Daddy Withers was so
independent-like he would jest natcherally try to force two words to
rhyme whether the Lord made 'em fur mates or not--like as if you would
try to make a couple of kids kiss and make up by bumping their heads
together. They jest simply won't do it. But Doctor Kirby, he let on like
he thought it was fine poetry, and he read them pieces over and over
agin, out loud, and the old man and the old woman was both mighty
tickled with the way he done it. He wouldn't of had 'em know fur
anything he didn't believe it was the finest poetry ever wrote, Doctor
Kirby wouldn't.

They was four little books of it altogether. Slim books that looked as
if they hadn't had enough to eat, like a stray cat whose ribs is rubbing
together. It had cost Daddy Withers five hundred dollars apiece to get