happened before. Silly Sally purred beseechingly as she followed
her master about the room and out to the wood-pile, reminding him
that she liked chicken bones.

While putting the bread in the large tin box that stood on the
stair-landing, I had some difficulty with the clasp. "Never mind
that," said Mr. Burroughs, as he scraped the potato skins into the
fire; "a Vassar girl sat down on that box last summer, and it's
never been the same since."

The work finished, there was more talk before the fire. It was here
that the author told his guest about Anne Gilchrist, the talented,
noble-hearted Englishwoman, whose ready acceptance of Whitman's
message bore fruit in her penetrating criticism of Whitman, a
criticism which stands to-day unrivaled by anything that has been
written concerning the Good Gray Poet.

Like most of Mr. Burroughs' readers, I cherish his poem "Waiting,"
and, like most of them, I told him so on seeing him seated before
the fire with folded hands and face serene, a living embodiment of
the faith and trust expressed in those familiar lines. It would
seem natural that he should write such a poem after the heat of the
day, after his ripe experience, after success had come to him; it is
the lesson we expect one to learn on reaching his age, and learning
how futile is the fret and urge of life, how infinitely better is
the attitude of trust that what is our own will gravitate to us in
obedience to eternal laws. But I there learned that he had written
the poem when a young man, life all before him, his prospects in a
dubious and chaotic condition, his aspirations seeming likely to
come to naught.