The story was one of a poetic man with long, unclean fingernails who went
among people preaching the doctrine of beauty. It began with a scene on a
hillside in a rainstorm where the poetic man sat under a tent writing a
letter to his sweetheart.

Telfer was beside himself. Jumping from his seat under a tree by the
roadside he waved his arms and shouted:

"Stop! Stop it! Do not go on with it. The story lies. A man could not
write love letters under the circumstances and he was a fool to pitch his
tent on a hillside. A man in a tent on a hillside in a storm would be cold
and wet and getting the rheumatism. To be writing letters he would need to
be an unspeakable ass. He had better be out digging a trench to keep the
water from running through his tent."

Waving his arms, Telfer went off up the road and Sam followed thinking him
altogether right, and, if later in life he learned that there are men who
could write love letters on a piece of housetop in a flood, he did not
know it then and the least suggestion of windiness or pretence lay heavy
in his stomach.

Telfer had a vast enthusiasm for Bellamy's "Looking Backward," and read it
aloud to his wife on Sunday afternoons, sitting under the apple trees in
the garden. They had a fund of little personal jokes and sayings that they
were forever laughing over, and she had infinite delight in his comments
on the life and people of Caxton, but did not share his love of books.
When she sometimes went to sleep in her chair during the Sunday afternoon
readings he poked her with his cane and laughingly told her to wake up and
listen to the dream of a great dreamer. Among Browning's verses his
favourites were "A Light Woman" and "Fra Lippo Lippi," and he would recite