if I were she."

"Should you, indeed?" said Longfellow. "That is a good suggestion. Now,
suppose you recite it off to me, so that I shall not have to look it up
in my books, and I will write as you recite. But slowly; you know I am
an old man, and write slowly."

Edward thought it strange that Longfellow himself should not know his
own great words without looking them up. But he recited the four lines,
so familiar to every schoolboy, and when the poet had finished writing
them, he said:

"Good! I see you have a memory. Now, suppose I copy these lines once
more for the little girl, and give you this copy? Then you can say, you
know, that you dictated my own poetry to me."

Of course Edward was delighted, and Longfellow gave him the sheet as it
is here:

Let us, then, be up and doing,
with a heart for any fate,
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.
Henry W. Longfellow

Then, as the fine head bent down to copy the lines once more, Edward
ventured to say to him:

"I should think it would keep you busy if you did this for every one who
asked you."

"Well," said the poet, "you see, I am not so busy a man as I was some
years ago, and I shouldn't like to disappoint a little girl; should
you?"

As he took up his letters again, he discovered five more requests for
his autograph. At each one he reached into a drawer in his desk, took a
card, and wrote his name on it.

"There are a good many of these every day," said Longfellow, "but I
always like to do this little favor. It is so little to do, to write
your name on a card; and if I didn't do it some boy or girl might be
looking, day by day, for the postman and be disappointed. I only wish I
could write my name better for them. You see how I break my letters?
That's because I never took pains with my writing when I was a boy. I
don't think I should get a high mark for penmanship if I were at school,
do you?"

"I see you get letters from Europe," said the boy, as Longfellow opened
an envelope with a foreign stamp on it.

"Yes, from all over the world," said the poet. Then, looking at the boy
quickly, he said: "Do you collect postage-stamps?"

Edward said he did.

"Well, I have some right here, then," and going to a drawer in a desk he
took out a bundle of letters, and cut out the postage-stamps and gave
them to the boy.

"There's one from the Netherlands. There's where I was born," Edward
ventured to say.

"In the Netherlan