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“On the contrary,” he said, “it’s exactly what it used to be. And that’s the–ahem–of it! Pardon me, ladies.”

“When do you start?” he was asked.

“Not for a week,” he answered pompously. “I have several little odds and ends to look into first–” And right in the midst of his speech the call of the South hit him in the middle, you may say. It always does hit a bird like that, and it is contagious like girls fainting in a factory.

The cynical bachelor flew suddenly to the tipmost top of a tree, and poured forth the whole of his heart and soul in a song of the South. “I’ve got to go–I’ve got to go,” he sang:

“For it’s there that I must be,
Where the flower of the pomegranate blazes
In the top of the pomegranate tree.

“And as for the dangers of travel,
I’d laugh–if I hadn’t to sing.
For a gale is a silly old zephyr
And a bird is a wonderful thing,
A wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful thing.”

Two more verses he sang at the top of his lungs, broke off short with a shrill cry of joy, and took wing.

Then the south-sickness spread, and even the young birds flew to the tops of trees, and defied gales, snakes, the Statue of Liberty, the boy with the gun, and the female (you wouldn’t call her a woman) with the untrimmed hat. And away they flew, in ones and twos, until there were only a few left. One of these hopped on the window-sill in full view, and told the Poor Boy to get up.

“Don’t be setting such an example of sloth,” she said, and squeaked at her own temerity and flew away.

The Poor Boy leaped from bed, and flung his pajamas afar, and rushed for cold water.

The shower fell heavily with wondrous iciness, and the Poor Boy sang aloud and praised God, who had once more returned him the gift of seeing and hearing. At breakfast he told Martha, and with the utmost gravity repeated to her everything that the birds had said–for him.

V

The power of imagining returned to him slowly. There were whole days when his inner eyes and ears remained obstinately blind and deaf. When a

“Primrose by the river’s brim
A yellow primrose was to him,
And it was nothing more”

(only there were no primroses at this season); when the southing birds in the ivy outside his window only made noises and were a nuisance; and when the burden of his thoughts was one long “done for–done for–done for.” It was the affection of many people that he missed most, and the faith that so many people had had in him–shattered forever. But he missed their voices, too, and their faces; the cheerful sounds of “talking at once”; the massing of fresh, lovely gowns, the scintillation of jewels, the smell of gardenias, the music of violins, hidden by screens of palms and bay-trees.

What had he done to deserve exile and ostracism? He asked himself that question thousands of times. He knew, of course, what he was believed to have done, but he was in search of some committed sin, to account for his having been punished for one that had only been circumstantially alleged. And in the whole memory that he had of his life and acts he could not find an answer. Every life is full of little sins, but of major ones the Poor Boy had no recollection.

On the days when his imagination was “no good” he had the face of one who is worried over something important that has been lost and that can not be found. And, indeed, the gift was of tremendous importance to him, and he knew it. It was the weapon with which he must fight off insanity; the tongs with which he must snatch from the fires of experience whatever bright fragments of life were not yet consumed.