Oh! labelled and looked at like the star freak of a circus tent. Or, as he himself whimsically protests, "One might as well be a white mouse with pink eyes." So he retreats from the front porch where he loves to linger, but where lately
The cam-e-ras
will catch him
if he don't watch out!
It is only that the American nation knows now that some time ago in the middle west unto them was born the greatest poet of a generation. So they are coming to Indianapolis to bring him the laurel wreath of their admiration. That it is done in the curious vandal American way, that would crown him and then carry away a piece of the crown as a souvenir, makes the tribute not the less real. Only the staring glare of publicity shines a trifle unpleasantly in eyes that have loved so well just starlight and sunlight falling in flickering shadows in Lockerbie Street.
***
Perhaps you might not think that this would be where a man would want to live, who is reputed to have made a half million dollars from his verses. That is, you might not, unless it were given you to see with somewhat of his vision. It is quite apart from the fashionable district. It looks like something that the village forgot when it went on to its city days. It is narrow and quiet. There is so little hurrying that the grass finds time to grow soft green fringes between the red bricks of the humpety-bumpety sidewalks. The dark cool branches of the trees lock and lovingly interlace above the gravel roadway that fairly runs into a tiny Dame Trot cottage, standing right in its path at the end of the single block. And some of the houses nestle close to the sidewalk, and some have picket fences to set them apart, and one has a blue pump in the front yard, and one has its front porch sagging in a tired kind of way. They are not shiny, new and expressionless. They are all houses that say something. They are mostly weather-beaten and worn with the lives lived in them, and they
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