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“Well,” whispered my friend, with rather odd irrelevance, I thought, “of course you see through the scheme of the fellows by this time, don’t you?”

“I see nothing,” said I, most earnestly, “but a poor little wisp of a child that makes me love him so I dare not think of his dying soon, as he surely must! There; listen!” And the plaintive gaiety of the homely poem ran on:

“At evening, when the ironin’s done, an’ Aunty’s fixed the fire,
An’ filled an’ lit the lamp, an’ trimmed the wick an’ turned it higher,
An’ fetched the wood all in far night, an’ locked the kitchen door,
An’ stuffed the ole crack where the wind blows in up through the floor–
She sets the kittle on the coals, an’ biles an’ makes the tea,
An’ fries the liver an’ the mush, an’ cooks a egg far me;
An’ sometimes–when I cough so hard–her elderberry wine
Don’t go so bad far little boys with ‘Curv’ture of the Spine!'”

“Look!” whispered my friend, touching me with his elbow. “Look at the Professor!”

“Look at everybody!” said I. And the artless little voice went on again half quaveringly:

“But Aunty’s all so childish-like on my account, you see,
I’m ‘most afeared she’ll be took down–an’ ‘at’s what bothers me!—
‘Cause ef my good ole Aunty ever would git sick an’ die,
I don’t know what she’d do in Heaven–till I come, by an’ by:–
Far she’s so ust to all my ways, an’ ever’thing, you know,
An’ no one there like me, to nurse, an’ worry over so!–
‘Cause all the little childerns there’s so straight an’ strong an’ fine,
They’s nary angel ’bout the place with ‘Curv’ture of the Spine!'”

The old Professor’s face was in his handkerchief; so was my friend’s in his; and so was mine in mine, as even now my pen drops and I reach for it again.

I half regret joining the mad party that had gathered an hour later in the old law-office where these two graceless characters held almost nightly revel, the instigators and conniving hosts of a reputed banquet whose menu’s range confined itself to herrings, or “blind robins,” dried beef, and cheese, with crackers, gingerbread, and sometimes pie; the whole washed down with anything but

“—-Wines that heaven knows when
Had sucked the fire of some forgotten sun,
And kept it through a hundred years of gloom
Still glowing in a heart of ruby.”

But the affair was memorable. The old Professor was himself lured into it, and loudest in his praise of Hedrick’s realistic art; and I yet recall him at the orgie’s height, excitedly repulsing the continued slurs and insinuations of the clammy-handed Sweeney, who, still contending against the old man’s fulsome praise of his more fortunate rival, at last openly declared that Hedrick was not a poet, not a genius, and in no way worthy to be classed in the same breath with himself–“the gifted but unfortunate Sweeney, sir–the unacknowledged author, sir–‘y gad, sir!–of the two poems that held you spell-bound to-night!”