fellow, he realized that
he was to see the man around whose head the boy's youthful reading had
cast a sort of halo. And when he saw the head itself he had a feeling
that he could see the halo. No kindlier pair of eyes ever looked at a
boy, as, with a smile, "the white Mr. Longfellow," as Mr. Howells had
called him, held out his hand.

"I am very glad to see you, my boy," were his first words, and with
them he won the boy. Edward smiled back at the poet, and immediately
the two were friends.

"I have been taking a walk this beautiful morning," he said next, "and
am a little late getting at my mail. Suppose you come in and sit at my
desk with me, and we will see what the postman has brought. He brings
me so many good things, you know."

"Now, here is a little girl," he said, as he sat down at the desk with
the boy beside him, "who wants my autograph and a 'sentiment.' What
sentiment, I wonder, shall I send her?"

"Why not send her 'Let us, then, be up and doing'?" suggested the boy.
"That's what I should like 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 on
which he had written:

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 hi