snapper picked my pocket. That night I slept in a big drain pipe where they were putting up a building.

"Why isn't there a pawnshop where one could hang up MSS. for cash? In my hallroom over Connor's saloon I have got stuff that will be bid for at auctions some day (that isn't conceit, I know it), but at this moment, July 17, 1908, I couldn't raise 50 cents on it. If there were a literary mount of piety-a sort of Parnassus of piety as it were the uncle in charge might bless the day he met me. Well, it won't be for long. This cancer is getting me surely.

"This morning I'm cheerful. I've scrubbed and swept Paunchy's bar for him, and the dirty, patchouli-smelling hop-joint he keeps upstairs, bless his pimping old heart. And I've had a real breakfast: boiled red cabbage, stewed beef (condemned by the inspector), rye bread, raw onions, a glass of Tom and Jerry, and two big schooners of the amber. I'm working on my Third Avenue novel.called 'The L.'

"I shan't give you my right address, or you'd send someone down here to give me money, you damned philanthropist. Connor ain't the real name, so there. When I die (soon) they'll find Third Avenue written on my heart, if I still have one.

It is interesting to recall that the MS. of his poems "Pavements, and Other Verses" was bought by a private collector for $250 last winter. Will not some literary agent think over this idea?

A MORNING IN MARATHON

NE violet throbbing star was climbing in the southeast at half-past four, and the

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whole flat plain was rich with golden moonlight. Early rising in order to quicken the furnace and start the matinsong in the steampipes becomes its own reward when such an orange moon is dropping down the sky. Even Peg (our most volatile Irish terrier) was plainly awed by the blaze of pale light, and hopped gingerly down the rimy back steps. But the cat was unabashed. Cats are born by moonlight and are leagued with the powers of darkness and mystery. And so Nicholas Vachel Lindsay (he is named for the daring poet of Illinois) stepped into the moonshine without a qualm.

There are certain little routine joys known only to the servantless suburbanite. Every morning the baker leaves a bag of crisp French rolls on the front porch. Every morning the milkman deposits his little bottles of milk and cream on the back steps. Every morning the furnace needs a little grooming, that the cheery thump of rising pressure may warm the radiators upstairs.

Then the big agate kettle must be set over the blue gas flame, for hot water is needed both for shaving and cocoa. Our light breakfast takes only a moment to prepare. By the time the Nut Brown Maid comes singing downstairs, cocoa, rolls, and boiled eggs are ready in the sunny little dining room, and the Tamperer is bathed and shaved and telephoning to Central for "the exact time." The 8:13 train waits for no man, and it is nearly a mile to the station.

But the morning I think of was not a routine morning. On routine mornings the Tamperer rises at ten minutes to seven, the alarm clock being set for 6:45: which allows five minutes for drowsy head. The day in question was early February when snow lay white and powdery on the ground, and the 6 o'clock train from Marathon had to be caught. There is an express for Philadelphia that leaves the Pennsylvania Station at 7:30 and this the Tamperer had to take, to make a 10 o'clock appointment in the Quaker City. That was why the alarm clock rang at half-past four.

I cannot recall a more virginal morning than that snowy twilight before the dawn. No description that I have ever read—not even the daybreak in "Prince Otto," or Pippa's dawn boiling in pure gold over the rim of night-would be just

"Songs of Childhood," was published in England in 1902. Besides poetry he has written novels and essays, all shot through with a phosphorescent sparkle of imagination and charm. He has the knack of "words set in delightful proportion"; and "Peacock Pie" is the most authentic knapsack of fairy gold since the "Child's Garden of Verses."

I am tempted to think that Mr. de la Mare is the kind of poet more likely to grow in England than America. The gracious and fine-spun fabric of his verse, so delicate in music, so quaint and haunting in imaginative simplicity, is the gift of a land and life where rewards and fairies are not wholly passed away. Emily Dickinson and Vachel Lindsay are among our contributors to the songs of gramarye: but one has only to open "The Congo" side by side with "Peacock Pie" to see how the seductions of ragtime and the clashing crockery of the Poetry Society's dinners are coarsening the fibres of Mr. Lindsay's marvellous talent as compared with the dainty horns of elfin that echo in Mr. de la Mare. And it is a long Pullman ride from Spoon River to the beedroned gardens where De la Mare's old women sit and sew. Over here we have to wait for Barrie or Yeats or Padraic Colum to tell us about the fairies, and Cecil Sharp to drill us in their