For I wouldn't want anything to happen that I'd come to in there with no tobacco on hand!" He can be just that natural and familiar, as if he were not a great personage.
***
Once they had a charity fair in Lockerbie Street and some one was trying to make a sign for the fortune-telling booth. Mr. Riley stopped and watched the work for a moment. Then he said, holding his hand out for the brush, "Better let me do that lettering. Sign painting was once my business, you know." And when the various booths had been apportioned among the different neighbors, they asked, "Now, Mr. Riley, what are you going to do for the Fair?"
"I'll do anything you want, if only you won't make a show of me," he replied earnestly. They had wanted him to give readings from his poems, but he wouldn't. So finally he compromised by writing the poem, "The Lockerbie Street Fair," which they sold for a dollar a copy.
At the corner grocery he has often dropped in to ask, "Any red apples to-day, Mr. Kiser?" When he gets one, he leans against a cracker barrel. Having polished the fruit carefully, he snaps his teeth in with the zest of a boy, and is off on reminiscences of the days when he was a wandering musician along with a patent medicine wagon, traveling through Indiana where the groceryman used to live. Or, if it is summer time, he stops on the sidewalk outside, tips a chair against the wall, and with other neighborly spirits, laughs and tells stories until bed time.
"See that man going by on the other side of the street with a basket?" says one. "He's worth a lot of money, and I knew him when he didn't have a cent."
"Owes me yet for the basket," chimes in the groceryman.
"Shucks," says Riley, "let me tell you a better one. Why, when I struck town, I'd hardly a rag to my back. Now look 'em over!"
18
