t inside--like the
rest of us.

Well, it was amazing once we began talking not of books but of life, how
really eloquent and human he became. From being a distant and
uncomfortable person, he became at once like a near neighbour and
friend. It was strange to me--as I have thought since--how he conveyed
to us in few words the essential emotional note of his life. It was no
violin tone, beautifully complex with harmonics, but the clear simple
voice of the flute. It spoke of his wife and his baby girl and his home.
The very incongruity of detail--he told us how he grew onions in his
back yard--added somehow to the homely glamour of the vision which he
gave us. The number of his house, the fact that he had a new cottage
organ, and that the baby ran away and lost herself in Seventeenth
Street--were all, curiously, fabrics of his emotion.

It was beautiful to see commonplace facts grow phosphorescent in the
heat of true feeling. How little we may come to know Romance by the
cloak she wears and how humble must be he who would surprise the heart
of her!

It was, indeed, with an indescribable thrill that I heard him add the
details, one by one--the mortgage on his place, now rapidly being paid
off, the brother who was a plumber, the mother-in-law who was not a
mother-in-law of the comic papers. And finally he showed us the picture
of the wife and baby that he had in the cover of his watch; a fat baby
with its head resting on its mother's shoulder.

"Mister," he said, "p'raps you think it's fun to ride around the country
like I do, and be away from home most of the time. But it ain't. When I
think of Minnie and the kid--"

He broke off sharply, as if he had suddenly remembered the shame of such
confidences.

"Say," he asked, "what page is that poem on?"

I told him.

"One forty-six," he said. "When I get home I'm going to read that to
Minnie. She likes poetry and all such things. And where's that other
piece that tells how a man feels when he's lonesome? Say, that fellow
knew!"

We had a genuinely good time, the agent and I, and when he finally rose
to go, I said:

"Well, I've sold you a new book."

"I see now, mister, what you mean."

I went down the path with him and began to unhitch his horse.

"Let me, let me," he said eagerly.

Then he shook hands, paused a moment awkwardly as if about to say
something, then sprang into his buggy without saying it.

When he had taken up his reins he remarked:

"Say! bu