affection for Peter that made him thus rudely switch my mind from him
and his garden to Peter and his need of me, which Sam may have thought
was greater than the need of his onions and turnip salad; but I don't
see how Sam could have construed cruelty to me as generosity to Peter.

"Please God," I prayed out into the everlasting hills toward which Sam
was running away from me and 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