a chance to say, 'Um, he learned that from Jim.'" Afterward for a while Mr. Riley lived at a hotel. Then his most intimate friend, Major Holstein, an Indianapolis lawyer who also wrote sonnets, said, "Come and live at our house." And he has been there ever since. He seldom goes away when he can help it. Here is home. He has no other.
***
Out at Greenfield, a town twenty miles distant, he owns a house. It is the simple old frame house in yellow and white that he has immortalized in his verse. And people say, "Why doesn't he live there, he loved it so!" O, but that is just why. He loved it so. And now the voice of the house is still. There was a gentle, fair-haired woman and a tall dark man and five happy little Hoosier chaps. And he cannot find them anywhere, not in the little room up under the eaves where Bud and Johnny slept. Not out where they ate their supper on the porch, not on the winding spiral stair that used to echo with circus feats. Not even our hired girl Elizabeth Ann or the Raggedy Man answer his call in the kitchen. They are all gone away. And he cannot stay without them. But the crickets and the katydids are chirping a reminiscent musical note of his boyhood, and the scent of the old red apple-tree's bloom is heavy on the summer dusk. He pauses on the front piazza and looks down the road. For a moment he can almost see again long white caravans of prairie schooners moving by on into the West. Then out from the horizon, rimmed by a sunset sky, shoots a streak of light, and with a rasping, discordant buzzing, a trolley car has gone whizzing past, shattering its way ruthlessly through the white vision of yesterday.
And he goes back to Lockerbie Street. It will never have the haunting romance of the wonderful boy world from which he has journeyed. But it has living folks. And he likes it. It is about the one place left now where he can be a man as well as a poet. People who live next door do not stand off as he passes and nudge each other and
16
