poet was most pleased with a bunch of violets picked from the
banks of the Brandywine by the children of a Riley school.

It was on this last birthday that an afternoon festival of Riley
poems set to music and danced in pantomime took place at
Indianapolis. This was followed at night by a dinner in his
honor at which Charles Warren Fairbanks presided, and the
speakers were Governor Ralston, Doctor John Finley, Colonel
George Harvey, Young E. Allison, William Allen White, George Ade,
Ex-Senator Beveridge and Senator Kern. That night Riley smiled
his most wonderful smile, his dimpled boyish smile, and when he
rose to speak it was with a perceptible quaver in his voice that
he said: "Everywhere the faces of friends, a beautiful throng of
friends!"

The winter and spring following, Riley spent quietly at Miami,
Florida, where he had gone the two previous seasons to escape the
cold and the rain. There was a Riley Day at Miami in February.
In April, he returned home, feeling at his best, and, as if by
premonition, sought out many of his friends, new and old, and
took them for last rides in his automobile. A few days before
the end, he visited Greenfield to attend the funeral of a dear
boyhood chum, Almon Keefer, of whom he wrote in A Child-World.
All Riley's old friends who were still left in Greenfield were
gathered there and to them he spoke words of faith and good
cheer. Almon Keefer had "just slipped out" quietly and
peacefully, he said, and "it was beautiful."

And as quietly and peacefully his own end came--as he had desired
it, with no dimming of the faculties even to the very close, nor