his own voice with a melancholy bray of welcome that would shake the
windows and start the neighbors from their slumbers. Old Don is passing
his declining years in an "Old Kentucky home," and the robins and the
blue jays as they return with the spring will look in vain for the
friend who fed them at the window.

The family dog at Amherst, which was immortalized many years later with
"The Bench-Legged Fyce," and which was known in his day to hundreds of
students at the college on account of his surpassing lack of beauty,
rejoiced originally in the honest name of Fido, but my brother rejected
this name as commonplace and unworthy, and straightway named him
"Dooley" on the presumption that there was something Hibernian in his
face. It was to Dooley that he wrote his first poem, a parody on "O Had
I Wings Like a Dove," a song then in great vogue. Near the head of the
village street was the home of the Emersons, a large frame house, now
standing for more than a century, and in the great yard in front stood
the magnificent elms which are the glory of the Connecticut valley. Many
times the boys, returning from school, would linger to cool off in the
shade of these glorious trees, and it was on one of these occasions that
my brother put into the mouth of Dooley his maiden effort in verse:

O had I wings like a dove I would fly,
Away from this world of fleas;
I'd fly all round Miss Emerson's yard,
And light on Miss Emerson's trees.

Even this startling parody, which was regarded by the boys as a
veritable stroke of genius, failed to impress the adult villagers with
the conviction that a poet was budding. Yet how much of quiet humor and
lively imagination is betrayed by these four lines. How easy it is now