good" he had the face of one
who is worried over something important that has been lost and that can
not be found. And, indeed, the gift was of tremendous importance to him,
and he knew it. It was the weapon with which he must fight off insanity;
the tongs with which he must snatch from the fires of experience
whatever bright fragments of life were not yet consumed.

Now this imagination of the Poor Boy's was not a servant that came and
went at command, but a master. He could not say to himself, "now I will
lie back upon the wings of my imagination and fly a pleasant hour"--or
rather he could say just that if he liked, but nothing would happen. It
was he who served; he was an abode in which his imagination might lodge
whenever it so pleased, and whence it might also fare forth. In the old
days it had found lodgment in the Poor Boy's head decidedly comfortable,
and had made long stays; but since society had wreaked its vengeance
upon him, it seemed as if his head, as a dwelling-place, had lost its
comforts and advantages.

His imagination was not of the kind which makes for literature or music.
It could not, in other words, shake itself clear of experience, and
journey into the unknown and the untried. It was not creative, but it
was of a quality so intense and vivid as to wage, sometimes, successful
disputes with the tangible and the real. Its action was a kind of
dreaming of dreams, whose direction and outcome lay within the option of
the dreamer.

Old Martha found him one day sitting on the kitchen steps with his feet
in the first snow of the winter. But the Poor Boy was really at Palm
Beach with a car-load of his friends, and he was not at all cold, he
thanked her, but hot--positively hot.

Notwithstanding, she ordered a change of shoes and socks, and listened
at his door half a dozen times that night for sounds of incipient cold.

The old woman's mirror told her that she was getting thin, that the work
she had undertaken was too hard for her, and sometimes when the men
drove in from the village with supplies (and the Poor Boy hid himself)
she blarneyed them into lending a hand here and there. For a good joke
sweetened with a little base flattery she got coals carried now and
then, or heavy pieces of furniture moved when she was house-cleaning;
but to the Poor Boy's constant appeals that she bring into the house a
permanent helper she turned a deaf ear. As a matter of fact, having
lived the best part of her lif