rn different verses, in the
hopes that if that dream _should_ come back, I could have 'em to
tell--tell 'em, you know, to the girl that was me. Because it hed got so
by then that it seemed to me I was actually more that poet than I was
Calliope Marsh. An' so it went along till the day I met him--the man,
the poet."

"The man!" I said. "But do you mean _the_ man--the poet--the one that
was you?"

Calliope nodded confidently.

"Yes," she said, in her delicate excitement, "I do. Oh, I'll tell you
an' you'll see for yourself it must 'a' been him. It was one early
afternoon towards the end o' summer, an' I knew him in a minute. I'd
gone up to the depot to mail a postal on the Through, an' he got off the
train an' went into the Telegraph Office. An' the train pulled out an'
left him--it was down to the end o' the platform before he come out. He
didn't act, though, as if the train's leavin' him was much of anything
to notice. He just went up an' commenced talkin' to the baggageman,
Bill. But Bill couldn't understand him--Bill was sort o' crusted over
the mind--you had to say things over an' over again to him, an' even
then he 'most always took it different from what you meant. So I suppose
that was why the man left him an' come towards me.

"When I looked up in his face I stood still on the platform. He was
young. An' he had soft hair, an' his face was beautiful, like he see
heaven. It wasn't to say he was _exactly_ like my picture," Calliope
said slowly. "For instance, I think the man at the depot had a beard,
an' the poet in my picture didn't. But it was more his look, you might
say. It wasn't like any look I'd ever seen on anybody in Friendship. His
hands were kind o' slim an' wanderin', an' he carried a book like it was
his only baggage. An' he had a way--well, like what he happened to be
doin' wasn't all day to him. Like he was partly there, but mostly
somewheres else, where everything was better.

"'Perhaps this lady will know,' he says--an' it wasn't the way most of
'em talks here in Friendship, you understand--'I've been askin' the
luggageman there,' he says, an' he was smilin' almost like a laugh at
what he thought I was goin' to answer, 'I've been askin' the luggageman
there, if he knows of a wood near the station that I shall be likely to
find haunted at this hour. I've to wait for the 4.20, an' it's a bad
time of day for a haunted wood, I'm afraid. The luggageman didn't seem
to know.'

"An' then all at once