with my arms clasping a tin can with a geranium plant r Heaven forbid!
Perry was different. The suggestion pleased him. He was rubbing his
hands and smiling in great contentment.

"I might send a po-em with it," he said. "I've allus found that poetry
kind of catches ahold of a girl when you are away. It keeps you in her
mind. It must be sing-song, though, kind of gettin' into her head like
quinine. It must keep time with the splashin' of the churn and the
howlin' of the wind. I mind when I was keepin' company with Rhoda
Spiker--she afterward married Ulysses G. Harmon, of Hopedale--I sent
her a po-em that run somethin' like this: 'I live, I love, my Life, my
Light; long love I thou, Sweetheart so bright'----"

Perry's po-em never got into my brain, for as he repeated the
captivating lines, I was gazing over his shoulder, out of the window,
down the road to the village. I saw a girl on the store porch,
standing by the door a moment as if undecided which way to go. Then
she turned her head into the November gale and came rapidly up the
road. In a minute more she would be passing the school-house door.
Tim's letter was in my pocket and the sun was still high over the gable
of the mill.

[Illustration: I saw a girl on the store porch.]

"Rhoda sent me a postal asking me to write her a po-em full of Ks or Xs
or Ws, just so as she could get the Ls out of her head, and----"

"Perry!" I broke right into his story and seized the lapel of his
waistcoat as though he were my dearest friend. "My girl is going by
the school-house door this very minute. Now you help me. Take the