at the mystery of their creation. He likes hollyhocks. "Not the new-fangled, ruffled ones," he says, "but plain ones, with room for a bee to get in and buzz, just as when I was a boy I used to catch 'em in there and hold 'em to hear 'em sing."
***
"In Lockerbie Street he is one of the folks."
Sometimes, when the summer sun is hot, he hears June and the bees and the clover calling, calling him back where he was a boy. He starts for Greenfield, finds a gray-haired man, and the two are off with fishing poles, wandering along the Brandywine looking for the old swimming hole and the long ago. At night they come back bramble scratched and happy. "Lacks the lickin" though, to make it real," says one. "Remember, Jim, how that always put the finishin' touches to a day's sport when we'd run away from school?"
Then they have gone home to Jesse Millikan's kitchen. Soon there was a clatter and a rattle of frying pans and the sound of sizzling fat, and James Whitcomb Riley was doing a fish to as beautiful a turn as he does a poem! "Now this is a meal to do a man's heart good," he used to say, as they sat down to the oilcloth covered table. Jesse Millikan died recently. He was a painter and paperhanger. Mr. Riley paid all his hospital and funeral expenses. It was he who always got the first copy off the press when the poet had out a new book. And it was to Jesse Millikan he wrote to announce his first success when the world began to recognize Riley as really great. "I'm so damfoolishly happy, Jess" was what he said.
26
