usual thing to beg or ask for shelter.

I could not sleep. My muscles were already overstrained from the
excessive effort of struggling along in the tenacious mud, like a fly
escaping from the edge of spilled molasses.

I had brought a box of small candles for just such an emergency. I lit
one after the other, sat on the seat, and read Keats all night ... in
an ecstasy, forgetting my surroundings, my pitiful poverty, my
pilgrimage that would seem ridiculous to most.

The rain increased. Outside it drummed and drummed. Inside it dripped
and dripped.

And as I sat there, upright, to escape the drip from the leaks, I
climbed to a high, crystal-clear state of spirit.

Again I burned through Keats' life as if remembering that it was what I
had myself suffered ... as if suddenly I awoke to the realisation that
_I_ was Keats, re-born in America, a tramp-student in Kansas....

And now Severn, my true, faithful friend, was with me.... Severn, who
had given up his career as painter to be near me in my last days ... we
were on the _Maria Crowther_ ... we were still off the coast of England,
and I had gone ashore for the last touching of my foot on English
soil....

There hung the great, translucent star of evening, at that hushed moment
of twilight, before any other of the stars had come forth....

"Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art--
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,..."

The evening star made me dream of immortality and love--my love for
Fanny Brawne....

Now we, Severn and I, were journeying across the country to Rome ...
voyaging, rather, through fields of flowers ... like my procession of
Bacchus in _Endymion_ ... that was a big poem, after all....

Now the fountain played under the window ... where I was to die....

"Severn, I feel the daisies growing over me."

"Severn, I--I--Severn ... I am dying ... Severn, lift me up--I--"

"Here lies one whose fame was writ in water." (How they cruelly laughed
at that--for a time!)

* * * * *

I gave a start, almost a scream of agony ... the candle, somehow, had
served me a ghastly trick ... it had cast my shadow backward on the wall,
like that shadow cast by the head of the dying poet, as Severn had
sketched it.... I ran my hand ove