he talk in Thatcher's boat, around the
sheet-iron stove, was good those crisp November evenings.

On Sunday Ware tramped off to a country church, taking his companions
with him. It was too bad to miss the ducks, he said, but a day's peace
in the marshes gave them a chance to accumulate. That evening he talked
of Emerson, with whom he had spoken face to face in Concord in that
whitest of houses. We shouldn't bring this into our pages if it hadn't
been that Ware's talk in that connection interested Thatcher greatly.
And ordinarily Thatcher knew and cared less about Emerson than about the
Vedic Hymns. Allen was serenely happy to be smoking his pipe in the
company of a man who had fought with Sheridan, heard Phillips speak, and
talked to John Brown and Emerson. When Ware had described his interview
with the poet he was silent for a moment, then he refilled his pipe.

"It's odd," he continued, "but I've picked up copies of Emerson's books
in queer places. Not so strange either; it seems the natural thing to
find loose pages of his essays stuck around in old logging-camps. I did
just that once, when I was following Thoreau's trail through the Maine
woods. Some fellow had pinned a page of 'Compensation' on the door of a
cabin I struck one night when it was mighty good to find shelter,--the
pines singing, snowstorm coming on. That leaf was pretty well
weather-stained; I carried it off with me and had it framed--hangs in my
house now. Another time I was doing California on horseback, and in an
abandoned shack in the Sierras I found Emerson's 'Poems'--an old copy
that somebody had thumbed a good deal. I poked it out of some rubbish
and came near making a fire of it. Left it, though, for the next fellow.
I've noticed that if one thing like that happens to you there's bound to
be another. Is that superstition, Thatcher? I'm not superstitious,--not
particularly,--but we've all got some of it in our hides. After that
second time--it was away back in the seventies, when I was preaching for
a spell in 'Frisco--I kept looking for the third experience that I felt
would come."

"Oh, of course it did come!" cried Allen eagerly.

"Well, that third time it wasn't a loose leaf torn out and stuck on a
plank, or just an old weather-stained book; it was a copy that had been
specially bound--a rare piece of work. I don't care particularly for
fine bindings, but that had been done with taste,--a dark green,--the
color you get looking across the