It was a living pastoral, full of the genuine breath of the fields, the
song of birds, and the pleasant chatter of trickling streams.

When the poet called again to see about it, with hopes of a beefsteak
dinner in his heart, it was handed back to him with the comment:

"Too artificial."

Several of us met over spaghetti and Dutchess County chianti, and
swallowed indignation with slippery forkfuls.

And there we dug a pit for the editor. With us was Conant, a
well-arrived writer of fiction--a man who had trod on asphalt all his
life, and who had never looked upon bucolic scenes except with
sensations of disgust from the windows of express trains.

Conant wrote a poem and called it "The Doe and the Brook." It was a
fine specimen of the kind of work you would expect from a poet who had
strayed with Amaryllis only as far as the florist's windows, and whose
sole ornithological discussion had been carried on with a waiter. Conant
signed this poem, and we sent it to the same editor.

But this has very little to do with the story.

Just as the editor was reading the first line of the poem, on the next
morning, a being stumbled off the West Shore ferryboat, and loped slowly
up Forty-second Street.

The invader was a young man with light blue eyes, a hanging lip and
hair the exact color of the little orphan's (afterward discovered to be