been, and as Sam and Tolly got right off in the car without answering
any questions, I was left to explain about Sam's foot and Peter. I paid
no attention at all to Billy Robertson when he said his foot was
blistered, too; but I told them how beautiful Peter was, and how
distinguished, and all about the poor young Keats that most of them
hadn't grieved over since their Junior years at school, telling it all
in such an eloquent way that Julia's great blue eyes filled with tears,
and I saw I could depend on her to be nice to our friend.

"I knew most poets were kind of calves, but I didn't know they had to
milk their poetry out of a genuine cow," said Pink, with a vulgar
attempt to be funny, at which nobody laughed, not even Julia, and she is
almost too tall and big to dance with anybody but Pink. She and Edith
and Sue and I forgot to save him the dances we had promised him; and he
had to dance with other girls he didn't like so much, until we all went
home in time to meet the sun coming down over Paradise Ridge with his
dinner-pail.

Then for five days it rained--heavy, determined, soggy drops; but the
next morning introduced one of those wily, flirtatious days that come
along about the last week in April in Tennessee. I awoke to the sound of
sobbing wind and weeping clouds in which I had no confidence, and
succeeded in convincing mother that it would be a beautiful day for me
to go out to see Sam and Byrd and Mammy. She sent Byrd half a jelly-cake
and a bag of bananas, and I got a jar of jam for him when I went down in
the cellar to exhume Grandmother Nelson's garden-book. A bottle went to
Mammy, which I suspect of being a kind of liniment that mother had to
learn to make on account of the number of the boys and their bruises.

Eph was a tragedy over my taking out Redwheels, and I am glad that