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MY DAYS WITH AN AMERICAN POET:

A NIECE REMEMBERS JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

 I.  UNCLE WHITCOMB’S LAST DAYS

     Uncle Whitcomb, my beloved Uncle, James Whitcomb Riley, once wrote to my mother and I:

      “…Have you thought of when you’re an ocean away that you may not have even the felicity of attending the funeral of a brother, only hearing of it, possibly, some days later, the very day of the night, perchance, Lesley days later, the very day of the night, perchance, Lesley is to play her look-stitch Concerto before the corned heads of the German Umpire?  In very truth, there are so many serious things to consider that I wish you’d come home – for a brief visit anyway – before your going.”

    Uncle Whitcomb wrote that letter as we were preparing to leave for Europe where I wished to study music.
     The idea of anyone James Whitcomb Riley loved going far away always irritated him.  He never could understand how anybody could ever wish to leave his beloved Indianapolis.  It never occurred to him, the most famous poet of his day, that he, unlike others, did not have to, because everybody came to him!  His panic at my decision to study abroad and his realization that mother and I would be absent for several years, made him write in expostulation to mother before we made actual plans to go.  He was in good health at the time, but his anxious imagination seized upon a varied sequence of calamities which he fancied might happen
     We, of course, returned for the visit he wished, and he surrendered gracefully when he realized that our hearts were set on making the journey.
     His melancholy prediction unhappily very nearly achieved prophecy, as some years later, while we were still overseas, he suffered the stroke from which he remained crippled until his death.  He had had several minor strokes, widely separated over a long period, and he secretly dreaded that a more serious one might some day leave a blighting injury.  His mental anguish, as he courageously fought his way back through the blackness which fell with the last seizure, does not bear talking about by those who loved him.  He had all the sharpened instruments for self-torture with which the introvert lacerate themselves.  He was too terrified to share his fears but grimly and silently struggled forward alone toward the light on his via dolorosa.

James Whitcomb Riley -different photos

     George Hitt, who first published the collection of Riley poems in book form – the now exceedingly rare and valuable first edition known as “The Old Swimmin’ Hole and ‘Leven More Poems,” was his closest and dearest friend.  Mr. Riley’s volatile emotional nature took great comfort in the undisturbable serenity and undismayed poise with which Mr. Hitt met life and cushioned its asperities for his friend “Jimmy.”  Mr. Hitt gave me a poignant picture of his first visit to the bedside of Uncle Jim which occured some time after the stroke that impaired both speech and memory.  He could not recall this meeting, although so many years afterward, without emotion.  He knew Mr. Riley’s physician and had talked over his friend’s condition with him.  He had been apprehensive of the verdict and was therefore prepared when the doctor stated that the entire side was affected, with all its dreaded implication.  Mr. Hitt requested that he be notified as soon as it was advisable to admit him and finally the day arrived.  He quietly entered and sat down at his friend’s side.  They looked at each other in the hushed atmosphere of the sick room and remained speechless for a few tense minutes.  Then those great blue eyes of the stricken man ran over with tears, and his lips trembled as he whispered: “George, I can say the alphabet.”  His friend, deeply moved, allowed him to repeat the letters to the end, glad, in the midst of this painful and pathetic scene, that his friend’s mind was beginning once more to function.
     Happily the recovery of his speech and memory was rapid, but, during the remaining four or five years of his life, he never entirely regained the use of his right arm and leg.  Though his walking was painfully dragging and, in moving about, required the slight support of someone’s arm, he again resumed a certain activity and took alert interest in his friends and their visits.  His lifetime habit of generous sympathy and consideration for others was quick to reassert itself.  Anniversaries and special occasions still furnished him the same excuse to gladden many a friend, or obscure shut-in, with carefully selected flowers and gifts.  I recall one Easter, when we were away, that he had contrived the delivery of such a quantity of flowers to our hotel suite that it was as if the whole of April had been gathered and spilled just for us.
     He loved to give as long as there was life in him.  It was never ostentatious – it merely seemed natural phenomena in contrast to the rest of the ordinary world.  My mother said that when I was a very little girl, she found me sitting in deepest reverie, once, after a particularly gift-laden call of his.  On questioning me as to my absorbed silence, she says that I remarked: “Do you know, mama, Uncle Jim reminds me of God!”  I believe that this same opinion, somewhat modified, was entered by a rather formidable number of those who ever knew him!  He was indebted to no one, as those who ever served or helped him in the slightest degree, were rewarded by him far in excess of their service.
     His death occurred during one of the most torrid Julys Indiana has ever known. It was almost certainly as the result of his wish to attend the distant funeral of an old school-day friend.  The drive, some forty miles in all, taxed his strength in extreme.  But he was happy afterward and smiled frequently saying it was the sort of funeral “old Bud” would have liked.  He smiled in recollection of the happy, youthful “swimmin’ hole” days, shared with boyhood friends, all of whom were long since dead, but acutely brought to mind by this trip to the Greenfield scenes about which he written so often.
     He had not been ill for some time and mother and I wee in New York.  There had always existed between mother and her brother Whitcomb, a strange awareness of the other’s need or illness.  The sort, which is so often, a characteristic sympathy between twins.  Mother woke at dawn from a vivid dream, in which she had seen Whitcomb struggling to the point of fainting in his effort to launch a small boat on the darkened waters which lapped a silent, starless, midnight strand.  He called to her for help and she, too, labored desperately.  It seemed of inexorable necessity that the boat be launched.  The somehow, half dragging his exhausted form, she made one last tremendous effort and succeeded in getting him aboard, and shoved him and the boat clear of the beach.  At once it gathered momentum and sailed out into what had suddenly become the dawn, with tranquil blue waters splashing against the boat which now gently cradled her brother who had fallen asleep.  The first rose-tenderness of dawn faintly touched his face which was no longer haggard and strained, but peaceful and contented as some child’s might be.  This she could see from the shore as she watched the boat drift from her view into its harbor.
     The telephone rang.  It was very early morning.  A long distance call: “Jim is dead,” a voice said.
     The doctor would not allow mother to travel.  She had been ill and under treatment for some weeks.  I returned alone.
     In Indianapolis, on my way from the station, friends, with whom I was to stay, drove by the State House which I could see the long, slowly moving line of Hoosiers formed on the sidewalks waiting their turn to enter and have a last glimpse of the man they loved, as he lay in state, under the domed roof of the Capitol.
     He had had no constraint in his attitude toward death, ever.  It was often the subject of his verse, but it was not as extinction that he wrote of death.  His fancy concerned itself rather with the imagined comments and sensations of the dead when looking back on the scene left behind.  The subject of a little poem of his came to mind as I took in the significance of the quiet people who were waiting for admission to his bier.  “In State,” was the poem, and it concerned a dead man’s detached awareness of his earthly surroundings, with a thread of sentiment about the girl who loved him – now that she knew him dead! I thought with a little catch at my throat, that, although he had received innumerable honors, and thousands loved him dearly as they would a friend, there was yet no one woman in all the grieving throng who loved him as a wife, nor as the girl who he had dreamed would love him, when he wrote his earlier poems.  He had been an incurable idealist in his love affairs and, was of course therefore unfortunate.  His love blindly clothed its object in royal raiment, and, while at first it flatter any woman with whom he was in loved to be so worshipped, it ended mostly by bringing out the worst in her.  He was such a temptation to the parasite.  His inescapable disillusionment in love bred in him no contempt for women, however.  He disliked any expression of harshness toward them.  He pleaded in “The Ban,” for event the lowliest to be found in the ranks of that oldest of professions.
     It was a melancholy kaleidoscope of thoughts which swiftly formed in sequence as I still watched the queue of people while our car slowly progressed through the downtown crowded traffic.  I was impressed by the great number of serious-faced little children who were included in the patient line.  It suddenly became almost unbearable – the mental picture of that childless man who so richly loved and uniquely understood all childhood – lying there “in state” with those hundreds of passing children, from the grubby and ragged to the precise and clean, all loving him because they loved his poems.  Many knew him personally – all of them by sight.  He was one of them and there was dignity in their bereavement.
     He had once said that if any minister ever “orated” or “funeralized” over him, he would surely arise and “kick the tail-gate” out of his coffin!  He despised the trappings of death – the abstract idea of undertakers, or “softly treading hypocrisies of pious mien.”  However, he had no horror of the graveyard.  Dr. William Lyon Phelps tells of a short cut they once made together through Crown Hill Cemetery, on their drive to the Indianapolis Country club, during which Mr. Riley remarked that he did not mind going through the place because he expected one day “to go there and not have to come back.”
     Much comment has arisen over the curious circumstance that after his death and before he had yet been removed from his bedroom, the door, which had not been locked for the many years of his occupancy of this same room, was discovered shut and locked on the inside.  His lifeless body had been unavoidably left alone a minute when this uncanny thing happened for which only a probable explanation has ever been found.  It was a windless day. No one was inside the room.  Entrance though the upper story windows would have been impossible without detection.  After considerable loss of time in various attempts to force the door, it was necessary finally to get on a ladder, in the hall, and climb through the high old-fashioned transom, drop to the floor and unlock the door from inside the death chamber.  It is believed that some vibration from the small electric fan must have been responsible.  If so, it chose the one particular occasion on which to perpetrate a macabre pleasantry which would even have delighted Mr. Riley himself.
     Today he lies buried on the beautiful summit of a hill under a simple slab, above which there arises a peristyle visible from a distance along the highway which enters the outskirts of the city at this point.  The rise is at one extreme boundary of Crown Hill and is said to be the highest point of land in the entire County of Marion.  It is, without exaggeration, the shrine of countless admirers who heap it with flowers on Decoration Day and on the anniversaries of his birth, October seventh, which the State long since has proclaimed “Riley Day.”  Nor is it unusual to find flowers on the grave at other times as well.  The spot is daily visited and is particularly beautiful in October when, because of its eminence, the visitor can see, for miles in all directions, the brightly bannered cortege of autumn in its passage across the field and woods of that Hoosierdom which Mr. Riley loved with such enduring passion.
     He lies facing the east and the rising sun.

II HOW MY UNCLE FELT ABOUT MY BECOMING A PROFESSIONAL MUSICIAN

     A professional career for a girl in no way coincided with my uncle’s ideas as to what was a “fit” life for me.
      He used to say that he did not care how much time or money I put into my musical studies, so long as they remained for my own pleasure.  That a girl should wish to have a musical career struck him as a reckless and preposterous, and for her to aspire to reach a state of excellence in music which might place her, as soloist, within the hoped-for reach of tasting the thrill of a symphony orchestra’s support in the Brahms’ Concerto, for example, was not understandable.  It sounded to him like the ambition of a stage-struck adolescent!  A man alone was capable of “standing the life” of a professional musician!  A woman, “Please god,” should instead aspire to “the peaceful security of marriage.”  Had not he traveled on the road for years?  And who knew better, first hand, than he, the heart breaking exactions it entailed, he enquired?

     That is not to say he was not a musician in his heart. There were compositions of simplicity which figured among Mr. Riley’s favorites; Taumerei was one such, and it greatly pleased him to have me play it on my violin while he placed the mechanical reproduction of it on his piano as accompaniment.  This was before he suffered the first serious stroke which so crippled him.  The following is one of his letters written me soon after this time when my mother took me East for further study, and shortly afterward on to Europe.

 

”Dear Lesley:
Your antique Uncle, seems like, jes’ can’t git nothin’ done, these Christmas times!  A dozen times I’ve intended trying to answer your good letter, but your letters deserve such good ones in reply, I simply can’t get the just length and repose of time in which to set down the multitudinous thoughts, cheers and congratulations that arise in your behalf as I read of your fine progress and well-doing every way.  So – even as I write – the vain longing for ten minutes, in which to write a few extra lines of special praises and encores, renders me chaotic, as you see, clawing on to the breathless page’s end.  But you write still continuously – and soon, now, I hope to reply in kind.  Whatever real exacting work confronts you, know, simply, that only by hard, persistent labor is any truly fine result attained – even by genius: Deserve the crown and you’ll wear it, in due time.
     Am sending Mary and you still another book with this, a true Indianapolis music story.  With best love to you both,
Your
Uncle Jim.

     This letter made me feel that my Uncle was behind me so long as I tried to master my craft.

     In music Mr. Riley’s taste was simple and joyous.  He played a number of stringed instruments and played them well.  My mother’s very earliest memory of her brother is that of listening to him lay his violin.  His tenderness to attempting to replace the watchful care and love of which their mother’s death head early deprived her, was expressed in countless ways, and it was largely due to a generous sharing of his than slender and intermittent income that she learned to play as a child, and to acquire the treasured possession of an old square piano.  There was always music in the house, as all three brothers loved to play and sing to their young sister’s accompaniment.  The pinch of poverty was often very acute, and the motherless, neglected brood had may problems of difficult adjustment; but, with their concerted determination to forget the unpleasant and create an escape from it, they succeeded in achieving many enviable hours of undiluted happiness.  Whitcomb and Humbolt, Hum, for short, both played the guitar as well as the banjo and with a creditable approach in virtuosity to Eddie Peabody!  Mr. Riley said that they were a joyous quartet as they sang and played together.
     My own generation has never heard the songs they sang and it is something of an adventure to hunt them up and play them.  They belonged to the decorous atmosphere of their era, and have a strange charm.  Only a few times did I hear them, and that was as a little girl, when the two uncles, John and Whitcomb, essayed to recapture the past, with mother again at the piano.  Their memories did not fail them and they enjoyed their excursion into the forgotten days.  But for fullest flavor they agreed that they needed the missing brother Hum, who died in his youth.  And they lacked the spur of mutual misery which had converted the book-stacked room in the old home into a precious haven where they met and, with the resiliency of youth, managed to shut out the reality of their wretchedness.  The ballads sung then were not those mawkish pieces which lend themselves to such hilarious burlesque now.  They were sung simply and had a certain gentle dignity.  For gayety, there were their own happy improvisations on the little waltzes and dances then popular.  The yearly visit of the Camp Meeting gave them an extensive acquaintance with Negro spirituals which had not then been sung to death over the radio as in our time.
     The young Hum was extraordinarily gifted musically.  He had what musicians call absolute pitch, and, although he contributed spiritedly to the trios and quartets of the family, his first love was for the classics.  He would deny himself and save heroically to go over to Indianapolis or Cincinnati for any visiting concert.  The infrequent advent of a symphony orchestra would fill him with ecstasy for weeks afterward; and he could recall with phenomenal accuracy anything he had heard only once.  He would describe with whistled and sung illustration the various themes and contrapuntal weavings of some symphony, much as a football enthusiast will excitedly detail all the plays of a major match.
     There is an interesting story attached to the violin Mr. Riley used to play, and it is partly told by him in his letter to Peter Cook.  After the instrument was broken in an accident, he grieved over it to such extent that he would never replace it nor play again on any other violin.  In later years he wished me to have a similar one, by a copy of an Amati, if it could be found.  Eventually he made me a present of much superior one.  His love for the violin was partly inspired by his having heard, at an impressionable age, Ole Bull, who, form most accounts handed down by critics, was decidedly expert at impressing an audience.
     The piano was one instrument Mr. Riley did not play, but he later compensated for this oversight by buying an electrical piano, at which he sat and pedaled an extensive repertoire of rolls.  He had a predilection for the bravura in music, particularly Liszt’s Second Rhapsody.  He frankly admitted that he admired but did not enjoy grand opera nor the major classics.  This cannot be held against him, for it is a peculiar and undeniable fact that the layman, even when highly cultured or gifted creatively in one of the sister arts, frequently has no appreciation for the degrees of culture in the literature of music.  It is of almost incredible record that Maeterlinck was disappointed to have Debussy instead of Puccini write the immortal score for “Paellas et Molisande.”

III. UNCLE WHITCOMB’S HELPLESSNESS AFTER THE EARLY DEATH OF HIS MOTHER

     The death of Uncle Whitcomb’s mother, my grandmother, was the greatest tragedy in his life and affected him down to the level of his soul.  All of his poetry bears a relation to this event.  Elizabeth Riley, his mother, had taught him how to feel deeply and express his sensations in poetry.  These expressions allowed him to survive very wrenching circumstances.
     Elizabeth Riley was the endearing fairy-book type of mother whom none of her children could ever recall in after years without deep emotion of attachment. She so lovingly surrounded her children with sweetness and with the beauty she managed to contribute to even the most unimportant details of living that forever after, they were inescapably conditioned and tragically unequipped to meet the harsh realities to found in life. After her death there was no one to gloss over the ugliness of poverty. Her affection and capable ways had known how to make enchanting even the meanest of necessary makeshifts.

     A man who can laugh at himself is pretty certainly enabled to survive even the most tragic setbacks in life and Riley had this faculty. The indelible memory of his years of disheartening, unending helpless struggles merely served to keep alive his sympathy for anyone else who struggled. Discouragement never soured into envy, as it seems to do to those with weak character. If it has strength, character, as well as talent emerges incorruptibly from the crucible of poverty. The humiliations and hardships were a searing experience at the time to him, but he could turn them to be humorous in retrospect.

     He was particularly unfitted to cope with the problems that life presented when poverty replaced the easy circumstances of his boyhood. Added to this was his helplessness to adjust to the desolate vacuum left by the death of his adored mother.

      After the death of Elizabeth Riley, what home there was, was broken up. Time after time, Uncle Whitcomb would fail in his efforts to earn money by some practical occupation. He drank too much, for his drinking was a matter of maladjustment, of escape, not of idle dissipation. His relations with his father became more strained. Captain Riley was a bookish scholar and himself impractical in many ways. His once thriving and well-remunerative law practice had been diverted into other channels during his years of absence from home on the battlefields. Upon his return, he no longer had the youthful energy to rebuild it. He was a trusting idealist who was taken advantage of by those he trusted. He never charged his clients who were poor, and those who could pay he never pressed. The results were unfortunate for his family. A second marriage was made, and, it was hoped to re-establish a home again so that all might be under one roof. It worked for a very short time. Then a pall of impermeable despair settled in the home, as it became all too apparent that this effort had been a tragic mistake.

     James Whitcomb kept eternally at his "scribbling" as it was derisively called. It never seemed to get him anywhere, as was also frequently and exasperatingly remarked by all but the worshipful little sister Mary. She used to paste his poems on long strips of paper and hang them from chair to chair as a preliminary drying process to final assemblage in childish effort to make a book of them. He felt that my other, who was this little sister, had been left in his particular charge by their mother, and he grieved continually and feared he could never left himself, nor her, out of the unhappy environment of their home life which preyed on his mind. He used to pick her up and weep stormily over her neglected appearance, remembering the dainty little things that the dead mother had somehow contrived even in their poverty. Interspersed with these moods of gloomy despondency would be soaring certainty of ambition he swore would soon be realized. The group of young men who were his companions all drank more than was good for them. He had no steadying friendship with the type of superior friend who was needed, at that time, to give him faith in himself and who could know how to reach him with opinions of any worth, or a sympathy which was balanced and expert in judgment of his problems.

     Captain Riley went about the task of intolerance and impatience. He was himself a man of unusual self-disciple and therefore despised what he considered a weakness in his son who drank to excess and thereby made of himself an object of malicious derision to certain of the townspeople. A good thrashing seemed to the father to be the only remedy for such "stupidity." The factors of an unstable nervous system, and of unconscious fear-directed attitudes with their mental and physical toxic poisons, were all unrecognized in that day. There was no intelligent approach to such problems employed. It was not a case of a selfish wayward self-indulgent son whom Captain Riley had to deal with, but that of an utterly impractical, sensitive, groping youth whose extreme timidity and sense of inadequacy had been accentuated by the handiwork of this same father’s mistaken severity. Given such a nature, and subjecting it to such cross-current early emotional pulls, with the additional deep shock of bereavement, plus a complete reversal of material fortune, all by the time he had arrived at his twenty-first year, it speaks well for him that he ever managed to emerge from his neurosis and to reach any constructive goal in life. An unswerving faith in God and the ultimate good of His designs, which had been imbedded during the rapturously happy earlier childhood he never forgot, assuredly accounts for much of his courage and determination during the dark years. That his extraordinary and fine sense of humor never died on him also explains much.

IV.  "AN OLD SWEETHEART OF MINE"

     It cannot be said that my Uncle Whitcomb never knew the love of a woman.  In fact, he loved one woman with great passion.  Other women, who claimed to have been his lover, are mere impostors.
      If Mr. Riley was incautious enough to correspond with some distant admirer of his poems, some girl or woman he had never seen, but whose letters were appealing in some fashion, his letters to her would later be certain to be offered for publication as "love" letters, if there happened to be a note of tendresse in them. At the inevitable conclusion of such a long-distance acquaintance, when he finally would meet face to face his over-idealized correspondent and discover her to be about as fair of face as the historical duchess Margaret of Carinthia, and thereafter gently withdraw from further correspondence. He was never successful in securing the return of his letters. A certain delicacy of sentiment always made it difficult for the recipient to part with her treasures, that is, until after his death, at which time they were "reluctantly" disposed of, for a consideration of several thousand dollars, to the nearest professional collector.

     There does exist a collection of genuine love letters and these are a record of a tragic attachment which lasted for eight years, and which could only have ended in bitterness. It is strangely amusing and pathetic now to read the last of the lot, which informs the woman that her letters are being returned by messenger and will she please likewise return his! She never did, and, as Mr. Riley never cared to buy them back during his lifetime, there being nothing in their contents which need shame him, they remained a drug on the market until after his death. When the letters finally came into the possession of his heirs, by purchase, and I read them through, I was struck by the chivalry and courage of his attempts to bring some order out of the chaos of their love. He must clearly have known that they were greatly unsuited to each other, yet he asks her to marry him more than once, and even sets the day, time and place in one of the letters.
      This woman was the one he envisioned in perhaps his most popular poem.

AN OLD SWEETHEART OF MINE

An old sweetheart of mine! - Is this her presence here with me,

Or but a vain creation of a lover's memory?

A fair, illusive vision that would vanish into air

Dared I even touch the silence with the whisper of a prayer?

Nay, let me then believe in all the blended false and true -

The semblance of the old love and the substance of the new, -

The then of changeless sunny days - the now of shower and shine -

But Love forever smiling - as that old sweetheart of mine.

This ever-restful sense of home, though shouts ring in the hall. -

The easy chair - the old book-shelves and prints along the wall,

The rare Habanas in their box, or gaunt church-warden-stem

That often wags, above the jar, derisively at them.

As one who cons at evening o'er an album, all alone,

And muses on the faces of the friends that he has known,

So I turn the leaves of Fancy, til, in shadowy design,

I find the smiling features of an old sweetheart of mine.

The lamplight seems to glimmer with a flicker of surprise,

As I turn it low - to rest me of the dazzle in my eyes,

And light my pipe in silence, save a sigh that seems to yoke

Its fate with my tobacco and to vanish with the smoke.

'Tis a fragrant retrospection, - for the loving thoughts that start

Into being are like perfume from the blossom of the heart;

And to dream the old dreams over is a luxury divine -

When my truant fancies wander with that old sweetheart of mine.

Though I hear beneath my study, like a fluttering of wings,

The voices of my children and the mother as she sings -

I feel no twinge of conscience to deny me any theme

When Care has cast her anchor in the harbor of a dream -

In fact, to speak in earnest, I believe it adds a charm

To spice the good a trifle with a little dust of harm, -

For I find an extra flavor in Memory's mellow wine

That makes me drink the deeper to that old sweetheart of mine.

O Childhood-days enchanted! O the magic of the Spring! -

With all green boughs to blossom white, and all bluebirds to sing!

When all the air, to toss and quaff, made life a jubilee

And changed the children's song and laugh to shrieks of ecstasy.

With eyes half closed in clouds that ooze from lips that taste, as well,

The peppermint and cinnamon, I hear the old School bell,

And from "Recess" romp in again from "Blackman's" broken line,

To smile, behind my "lesson," at that old sweetheart of mine.

A face of lily beauty, with a form of airy grace,

Floats out of my tobacco as the Genii from the vase;

And I thrill beneath the glances of a pair of azure eyes

As glowing as the summer and as tender as the skies.

I can see the pink sunbonnet and the little checkered dress

She wore when first I kissed her and she answered the caress

With the written declaration that, "as surely as the vine

Grew 'round the stump," she loved me - that old sweetheart of mine.

Again I made her presents, in a really helpless way, -

The big "Rhode Island Greening" - I was hungry, too, that day! -

But I follow her from Spelling, with her hand behind her - so

-

And I slip the apple in it - and the Teacher doesn't know!

I give my treasures to her - all, - my pencil - blue-and-red;

And, if little girls played marbles, mine should all be hers, instead!

But she gave me her photograph, and printed, "Ever thine"

Across the back - in blue-and-red - that old sweetheart of mine!

And again I feel the pressure of her slender little hand,

As we used to talk together of the future we had planned, -

When I should be a poet, and with nothing else to do

But write the tender verses that she set the music to...

When we should live together in a cozy little cot

Hid in a nest of roses, with a fairy garden-spot,

Where the vines were ever fruited, and the weather ever fine,

And the birds were ever singing for that old sweetheart of mine.

When I should be her lover forever and a day,

And she my faithful sweetheart till the golden hair was gray;

And we should be so happy that when either's lips were dumb

They would not smile in Heaven till the other's kiss had come.

But, ah! My dream is broken by a step upon the stair,

And the door is softly opened, and - my wife is standing there.

     This poem was one of Riley's most popular.  It was said to have earned him $500 a word - a princely sum in Riley's day.  A story set in New York City demonstrates its popularity.  A vagabond named McGlaughlin was brought to Court on an October day charged with loitering and vagrancy.  In defending himself he said that he was an actor and simply out of work.  "To prove I'm an actor just give me a poem to recite.  I'll orate any piece you choose."  The judge said if he could recite, "An Old Sweetheart of Mine" he would acknowledge that he was no "bum." McGlauglin did so and his reading was so good that the judge not only dismissed the charges but also had a collection taken up for the man in his courtroom.

 

V. DISCUSSING POETRY WITH ITS MASTER OF THE 19^TH CENTURY

     Poetry was the one inexhaustible subject Uncle Whitcomb loved to discuss, and I believe he bought about every volume that appeared, much as everyone else buys current magazines.  He was always searching for some new discovery.  Nor did he neglect old favorites.  His own copy of the Oxford Book of English Verse, which I have, is as worn as a devout man’s Bible.

     Never having been to Italy he was interested and immensely pleased when I told him that poetry, and good poetry, was so much a part of the ordinary life of all Italians; that quotations from Dante, Leopardi, Petrarch and many others were current coin in circulation in the every-day conversation of the butcher, baker and candlestick maker as well as of the aristocrat; that every town and city has its many streets and statues in honor of illustrious poets; and that this appreciation of poetry is so early inculcated that even children recite innumerable poems from a wide range of classics and moderns.

     It had been an unending surprise to me, in Italy, to encounter quotations from the major poets in the talk of such unlikely persons as street-car conductors, flower vendors, and even one time a taxi-driver who, when I directed him to a number of the Via Petrarch, recited audibly to himself, as he drove me to my destination, that famous Canzone of the poet, which begins, “Chiare, fresche e dolci aque”!  This last statement struck Mr. Riley as very interesting and he questioned me about the incident and about similar experiences for days afterwards.  He marveled at so universal a love of poetry and kept exclaiming over the old taxi-driver’s reciting of Petrarch.  “Was he some educated man, on his uppers?” he finally enquired?  Then when I replied that, on the contrary, he was illiterate in the ordinary sense, he smiled and remarked that I “must have been startled!”  We both wondered what we would do if an American taxi-driver started reciting Hamlet’s “To be or not to be,” as he threaded the maze of Firth Avenue.
     It would be fantastic to read into the Hoosier the temperament of the Latin, but there is one curiously shared similarity in that the former has taken Mr. Riley to his heart almost as completely as has any Italian taken his own native poets.  NO Hoosier but knows the name of Riley and can recognize or recite an impressive number of his works.  Poets and authors are impractical, and they very frequently die penniless and neglected, the “discovery” of their works being reserved for a later generation.  This was even truer of Mr. Riley’s day than it is of the present.  It is therefore remarkable that in addition to the honorary degrees given him by Yale, Pennsylvania and Indiana Universities, so many varied honors should have been given him while he was yet alive and could enjoy them.  The affectionate regard in which he was held by literally thousands of strangers and by the large circle of friends both the humble and the distinguished, is astonishing.  Hoosiers, not content with having erected their imposing State memorial, have numerous small ways also of remembering his name.  There is even a Riley telephone exchange!

      In his address, at the time of the dedication of the Riley Hospital, Dr. John H. Finley, associate editor of the New York Times, said:
     ”Riley was not the poet of the far, the abstract, the ideal.  He was the poet of the near, the concrete, the real.  But he made of his local Hoosierdom a part of the perpetual possession of the race, along with the Elysian Fields, the original Garden of the Hesperides, Plato’s Atlantis, More’s Utopia, Milton’s Paradise that was lost, and Dante’s Paradise that we hope to find.”
     It is possible that a century from now greater value will be attached to the scene and language which Mr. Riley’s dialect poems have recorded with such absolute fidelity.  The telephone, radio and automobile have, with great swiftness, worked entire obliteration of this scene of which he wrote, and which so recently was a richly romantic and important part of the brief epoch of the now extinct pioneer’s historic passage across the Middle West. 

VI. UNCLE WHITCOMB’S FIRST MEMORIES ABOUT HIS BEGINNINGS

     I once asked Uncle Whitcomb what was his earliest memory.  He instantly replied, “three things.”  First, his little trundle-bed, in the no longer existing log cabin of his birth, with the cabin’s fascinating interior of the early settler’s home, and where a large log fire dominated in winter.  Second, he recalled his father’s return from hunting, with a young deer hanging from his saddle.  And lastly, his own eager watching of the Conestoga Wagons, as they passed before his door, on the National Highway, in their adventurous progress westward, through the then little village of Greenfield.
     So rapid was the growth of the country, that the greater part of even this scene was altered by the time Mr. Riley had reached adolescence.

To My Old Friend

      Soon, Greenfield was no longer a village of about three hundred people, but a prosperous little town.  Captain Riley had already achieved a distinction in his career as a lawyer and in the legislature, and this had brought him a modest affluence in such degree that the cabin-frame dwelling was soon abandoned for a new home of prosperous appearance and size.  This house, erected on the same site, was to hold the happiest of carefree memories for all the family, as it grew, and it is this home which is today known as the Riley Homestead and visited as such my many.  After the Civil War, Captain Riley’s loss of fortune obliged him to sell the place, and the family had in consequence, to leave its happy shelter.  As a matter of sentiment Mr. Riley bought it back in later years although not for his own use.  He had an idea that it might serve as a place where he and his sisters and brothers could return together for pleasant summer vacation weeks, and thereby recapture the past.  The place was tried only once and found to be impractical.  The house had been rented and the tenants consented to allow Mr. Riley to occupy it and use their furniture while they moved elsewhere for the short period of the experiment.  As a result, the old home had an alien and uncomfortable feel about it, in addition to the discovery that the mere return to the physical scene of a rapturous past will not cause that past to rise phoenix-like from its ashes.  Too many changes occur in the scene for it ever to remain the same.  Mr. Riley continued to rent the property unfurnished to tenants, for many years after this one brief visit, and his residence in Indianapolis continues unbroken.  Still after, he decided to furnish the house of the use of his brother’s widow, but with no attempt to restore the vanished original in lovely early American pieces that the old home had once contained.  The task would have been too difficult and the effort lacked any incentive.
     In an article on Mr. Riley, Edgar Lee Masters analyzed the poet’s relation to the scenes about which he wrote and observes that: “Indiana was a happy County Fair to him, which he saw under unusual advantages, and with eyes peculiarly gifted for gathering in what was quaint and joyous and innocent in country and village life.”  The allegory is well taken, as is also Mr. Master’s observation that there is a certain Hogarthian character depiction, albeit, unlike Hogarth, Mr. Riley deliberately avoided penetrating behind the happy appearances of the Fair.  It is also possible that the pioneers who played their unconsciously dramatic parts in the enchanting pageant about which Mr. Riley loved to talk, moved in too swift a stream for any but the happiest of impressions to remain behind them as he watched their interesting passage.  Mr. Masters comments further in the following:

”What Riley did…was to give pure joy and compassion and tenderness, and very often great beauty to the Fair that he knew, to the life of Indiana of the pioneer days down to the dawn of the twentieth century.  He put Indiana as a place and a people in the memory of America, more thoroughly and more prominently than has been done by any other poet before or since his day for any other locality for people.  This challenging comparison will evoke the claims of other poets; Whittier and Bret Harte, for example.  But Riley created many more types than Whittier did; and he did it with greater variety and charm, and truer to the atmosphere of the Fair.  Riley was more of the people, than Whittier was, for he had a richer wanderjahre; Riley’s people were more to be with than Whittier’s.  The stocks of Scotch-Irish and English and Germans which poured into Indiana during the first half of the nineteenth century from the Carolinas, Virginia, Pennsylvania, from Tennessee and from Kentucky, were a more vital, human and picturesque people than the New Englanders with whom Whittier dealt, and who for the two centuries before his day, had lived in a state of unchanged and arrested activity.  Bret Harte succeeded with a few strokes of satiric genius, with the ‘Heathen Chinese,’ in chief, perhaps; but all in all, Bret Harte merely made a report of the American adventurer who absorbed a Spanish colony into the body of American life.  The California of Bret Harte is a land that came and went as a camp, pitched and taken down.  The Indiana of Riley was the spread of a people who founded a State and populated it before he was born.  His first vision of it showed him what it was at first, and what it had grown from without greatly changing his character.”

Dot

Poems such as this one carried the deep feeling of pioneer Hoosier life and generated great appreciation to Uncle Whitcomb from Hoosiers for expressing for them how they felt about their lives on the American frontier.

VII. UNCLE WHITCOMB’S LOVE FOR THE INNOCENCE OF CHILDREN

     There has never been an Uncle who was so doting to a child, as was my Uncle Whitcomb to me.  He was a man who loved children dearly and used his poetry to enrich their lives.

     It is often asked just what explains the arresting bond of unity which existed between Mr. Riley – who was a bachelor – and the Child World, and to what can be attributed the children’s own acceptance and recognition him as one of themselves? It seems to me that more than anything else he recognized how uncompromising is the judgment of the insincere or condescending adult by most children.

     Parental obedience may impose inhibiting restrictions on the child’s natural impulse to express impatience with the artificial attitudes of certain "grown-ups", but the politeness is mere lip service. I think he realized that there could be no remotest approach to friendship with children unless their own unconfused honesty is matched. The truest reason for his great popularity with them lay in his recognition of this clear vision of theirs, and he never made the mistake of insulting it by talking down to any little boy or girl. His unerring understanding of the child-mind and heart made him give his young friends the grave consideration of equals, and, in return, they gave him their confidence and affection in spontaneous and unmeasured outpouring.

     It was for the children that he wrote one of his most notable poems, Little Orphant Annie:

     Writing whimsically once, "To the Very Little Children," who had sent him an affectionate collective greeting on the occasion of celebrating Riley Day in their school in Indianapolis, he counseled that they must simply be themselves "even though" their parents did not seem to understand them perfectly; and he further cautioned them to be "patient with these same parents and to "love them no less loyally and tenderly." To take the part of the child against its parents and the adults of its environment, as he always did, is not the attitude of a man who despised children. When he has the little boy lispingly quote "Uncle Sydney as saying,  "The goodest man’s they is, ain’t good

As baddest little childs"

It is Mr. Riley’s own opinion that is being voiced.

       The Child World of which he sang was not the creation of a man who wrote with his tongue in his cheek. The portrait is absurd. He never forgot his own rich-memoried childhood, and some fairy gift enabled him to remain with the enchanted kingdom from which most adults are excluded. It is enough to read his correspondence with any child – and he had several such correspondents – to realize how easy it was for him to meet them on their own terms. The collection of his letters written to the young niece of the poet Edit M Thomas is a delightful illustration. The following letter written to me when I was studying music in New York is an example of the same charm with which he addressed a young person:

"Indianapolis, Ind.

My Dear Niece:

Your good letter pleased you old uncle very much – considering his advanced years and clouding mental infirmities. In fact, from time to time, as he first read our clear legible lines, your directness, as well as grace, together with just about the right tang and relish of cheer and humor, made him sit up like a gratefully receiving fox-terrier subtly recognizing an intelligence worthy of his really very best attention and consideration. Surely, I thought – and still think- here’s a young kinswoman of many fits and possibilities – divinely endowed to make the world at large a happier place to live in by reason of her bright inspiring presence. Know, too, by this, what perfect faith I have in your unspoilable common sense. Be assured always, my sister’s only child, that I love you equally and pray ever for your mutual fullest happiness.

     Haven’t seen Brer John since your going, but hear of his good health. All here are well –even the writer, though somewhat overworked. We have company at home and good times. Mrs. Holstein is in unusual health and spirits. She asks to be remembered kindly to you both.

Ever thine, Niece of mine,

Write `bout ten times out o’ nine!

To your old Uncle Jim."

   It goes without saying that as the one most dependable quality in children is interest, Mr. Riley never failed to hold spellbound the interest of any youthful audience. Children adored his conversation and hung breathlessly on his recital of some favorite poem for which they clamored. His inimitable manner of actually becoming the character of whatever poem he recited was an unforgettable thing, and as all children are essentially dramatic, they were rapturously thrilled by the play of metamorphosis which he paraded for them.

      As a matter of fact, adult audiences were no less thrilled when, from the lecture platform, he gave readings from his works. The theater would be packed, people helplessly alternating from shouts of laughter to uncontrolled sobbing, whenever he willed. A recently published account of one person’s recollection of the figure of Mr. Riley erroneously states that his voice was very "mellow" and "lovely."

     It was, on the contrary, harsh in timbre and almost unpleasant, but it was charged undeniably with a magic power to cast glamour. He used no gestures, was utterly simple in character. In one of his books of American travel notes of the nineties, written by the Frenchman Max O’Rell, he comments on this emotional power and how greatly Ellen Terry was moved, tears running helplessly down her cheeks, as Mr. Riley, at Augustin Daly’s request, recited at a banquet, "The Old Man and Jim" and "Dot Leedle Boy of Mine."

    Sometime after his death an impression regarding the sincerity of the poet’s affection for children circulated as the result of a chance paragraph written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in the travel notes of what was, I believe, his last American tour. A widely read periodical first published the notes serially, and they later appeared in book form. Sir Arthur wrote me that he had no wish to spread the unfortunate story, which originally he had accepted in good faith, and he requested his publishers to omit the misleading paragraph in subsequent editions of the book.

     Evidently a wish to be humorous at the expense of the late Mr. Riley, and to appear as an intimate friend, inspired Sir Arthur’s informant to state that, although the poet wrote so delightfully of children, he greatly disliked them and could not bear to have them near him. If true, it would, of course be a curious and interesting bit of "copy" illuminative of the hypocrisy of a man whose writings were pre-eminently an expression of the tenderest affection for childhood. Sir Arthur could not be blamed for accepting, as authentic, the misinformation given him the Indianapolitan who was a stranger to him, and who assumed such an air of authority.

      They were at the grave of the poet, where Sir Arthur had requested to be taken, that he might place some flowers as a tribute to his old acquaintance. Doubtless the opportunity to prattle importantly and to impress a visiting celebrity could not be resisted. In any case, the malicious comment of Sir Arthur’s cicerone might never have attracted such attention had it not been that Mr. Riley was quoted as referring to certain visiting school children as "damn brats." The use of this word was what at once betrayed the story as fictitious, because it so happens that, among real friends, Mr. Riley was known to have a peculiar to a number of words which he would never have used in conversation. "Brat" was known to be one of the abhorred collection. Nor could he have looked out the window, in surprise, and cried: "My God! Here are a bunch of those damn brats coming after me again!" He was an invalid, and no such visit could have been paid him by surprise, as no one attempted to see him without appointment. In the room in which he invariably received guests, his favorite fireside armchair was distant from the front windows viewing. A view of the entrance to his home would have been difficult. His right side being foreclosed, he remained seated in this chair and would not stroll about the room looking out windows. Furthermore, it eventually transpired that the person who fabricated the story was one who had the slenderest acquaintance with him, having been admitted only by appointment because of a position to discuss a fete which was being planned in his honor.

     Meredith Nicholson, in an article, indignantly denounced the canard which had victimized Sir Arthur, and, naturally, every one else who knew Mr. Riley, felt similarly. That outsiders accepted it as truth is unfortunately often evident. That it was not accepted by those in his own state is evidenced by the erection of the James Whitcomb Riley Hospital for Children. It was erected after his death as an enduring tribute to the "Children’s Poet" in the city in which he lived longest and where he lies buried. Several million dollars have been expended on this unique memorial to a poet, a large part being appropriated by legislation, and the reminder rose rapidly by subscription. Many thousand children in search of healing have passed through its hopeful door to find their hopes fulfilled.

VIII. UNCLE WHITCOMB’S MANY IMITATORS

     My Uncle James Whitcomb Riley has had many imitators, some of them have achieved great popularity and even fortune thereby, all of which is legitimate and flattering.  However, because of a superficial resemblance – that is, the choice of homely subject matter and of dialect verse – there seems to be a tendency in some present-day readers who are only slightly acquainted with Mr. Riley’s poetry, to judge his works mistakenly by his imitators.  An unprejudiced examination of one of his dialect poems, say “Thoughts for the Discuraged  Farmer” or “Armazindy,” will, nevertheless, instantly show the difference between Mr. Riley’s careful verse construction and scrupulous accuracy of dialect, and the careless verse and lack of accuracy of his “successors.”

     Practically all his poems were written before middle age.  Success had come to him in the amazing degree at forty.  Parenthetically, Mr. Lawrence Chambers, of Bobbs-Merrill Company, is authority for the surprising statement that “An Old Sweetheart of Mine” has, in the course of its life, earned more royalties than any other single poem ever written – that is, it has earned more money per word than was ever paid another poet.

     The life of James Whitcomb Riley was interesting because of its record of difficulties overcome. James Whitcomb Riley was a young would-be poet who, depressed by his failure intelligently to read law in his father’s Greenfield office, finally bolted and gave his "heels to the road" and roamed with a friend over the State of Indiana as an itinerant sign-painter! Such peregrinations as he then and later made gave him a wide acquaintance with the small towns and farm districts and directly bred in him his love and respect for the artless and sincere people he discovered to be their inhabitants.

     Mr. Riley wrote poetry of Hoosier types and captured moments of their lives in native verse. That is what poetry is meant to do.

     At no time has the mid-west farmer, even when illiterate, resembled in the remotest degree the peasant who tills the soil of Europe. A recent critic, who is more familiar with the Soviet peasant that with the farmer of his native United States, ignorantly and unjustly complains of the portrait Mr. Riley drew. The problems of oppression which have molded the peasant of Tolstoy and of O’Faclain, have never existed in this country, and the mid-west farmer could not have been pictured as conforming to any such tyranny-imposed pattern of tragic drama. In the seventies and eighties of the last century there was no acute farm distress in Indiana. Even the present unhappy condition is far removed from the agricultural slums which exist overseas and which, as Ernest Boyd has observed, only too frequently brutalize the European peasant because of the unbearable existence such conditions impose. The absence of such degrading poverty in agricultural Indiana accounts for the invariable note of gayety and mellow philosophy with which Mr. Riley treated the subject. It was the entirely faithful record of his accurate observations of a specific epoch and its people gathered during his years of wandering over the State. Grant Wood’s "American Gothic" captures the same sense of the mid-western farmer as was drawn with such unobservable sureness by Mr. Riley in "The Rubaiyat of Doc Sifers."

     Had it not been for his despairing sense of personal failure, his rebellion, and his health (which was threatening a breakdown) he would likely never have plunged into the roving experience that so intimately acquainted him with the irresistible copy of which he made such fortunate use. The constant change of scene and the carnival-like gayety of the outdoor traveling "medicine show" to which he attached himself, were the providential means of restoring his health and rescuing him from a permanency of crippling. His unswerving tenacity of purpose despite what were to him really formidable obstacles arouses admiration. The fact that he finally emerged successfully from disheartening struggle is not so significant as the fact that he emerged unembittered and generous, with his heart full of love. His interest in striving aspirants was remindful of that sort of humanitarian who takes in every stray or suffering human.

IX. THE MYTH THAT JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY BELIEVED HIMSELF THE RE-INCARNATION OF EDGAR ALLEN POE

     One of the great legends about my Uncle Whitcomb was that he believed himself the re-incarnation of Edgar Allen Poe.
     I suppose this myth derives from the fact that my Uncle was born on the day that Edgar Allen Poe died. He was well enough acquainted with mysticism to know that, according to its teachings, a dying man re-incarnates immediately except under very exceptional circumstances. Poe died In Baltimore, Maryland on the day that Mr. Riley was born in Greenfield, Indiana, and this unimportant coincidence somehow has give this stupid tale impetus.

     Others connect him to Edgar Allen Poe out of a desire to find links in the line of the great American poets. Many have considered him a successor to that poet and writer in the line of great American poets.
     The closest connection Uncle Whitcomb had with Edgar Allen Poe came from the famous "Leonainie Hoax."
      Uncle Whitcomb Riley was partly propelled into the national consciousness as a poet as the result of a hoax poem he wrote while working for an Anderson, Indiana newspaper.  He had formed a belief as a young man that no poet of the expanding frontier of America could ever achieve national fame. Uncle Whitcomb was acutely aware that his experience came from being a "Frontier" Midwesterner and not from the "cultured East."
     Poetry was very important to the American frontier.  My Uncle Whitcomb drew upon the power that frontier poetry had on the lives of Hoosiers.  He composed poetry for newspapers from an early age and he worked very hard to master its forms. Nevertheless he thought that his poetry was not receiving credit solely because he was an uncultured Hoosier and not because his poetry was less worthy than the poetry of others.

     To prove his point, he and some friends concocted a hoax. Riley wrote a "Poe-like" poem called "Leonainie" and then had it inscribed in an old book identified with the signature of Edgar Allan Poe. Then they had the old book "discovered" in Kokomo, Indiana. When the Kokomo Tribune, a newspaper of that city, learned of the discovery of a previously unpublished poem by Edgar Allan Poe in their midst they were duped into publishing it as such.

     The national press picked up on the discovery of a new Edgar Allen Poe poem and it made headlines throughout the country and even the world. The tragedy of the hoax was that Riley ended up getting fired from his newspaper job in Anderson when his authorship of the poem became known.  Uncle Whitcomb however considered that his point had been made. 
     My own belief is that my Uncle Whitcomb had a very keep dislike for this poet’s personality and it is even likely that his choice of Poe as the subject for the famous "Leonainie hoax" was an indirect, unconscious expression of his antipathy for Poe.

James Whitcomb Riley as a young man.

     The great “Hoax Poem” reads as follows:

LEONAINIE

Leonainie - angels named her;

And they took the light

Of the laughing stars and framed her

In a smile of white:

And they made her hair of gloomy

Midnight, and her eyes of bloomy

Moonshine, and they brought her to me

In the solemn night.

In a solemn night of summer,

When my heart of gloom

Blossomed up to meet the comer

Like a rose in bloom;

All the forebodings that distressed me

I forgot as joy caressed me --

(Lying joy that caught and pressed me

In the arms of doom!)

Only spake the little lisper

In the angel-tongue;

Yet I, listening, heard her whisper, -

"Songs are only sung

Here below that they may grieve you -

Tales are told you to deceive you -

So must Leonainie leave you

While her love is young."

Then God smiled and it was morning,

Matchless and supreme;

Heaven's glory seemed adorning

Earth with its esteem:

Every heart but mine seemed gifted

With the voice of prayer, and lifted

Where my Leonainie drifted

From me like a dream.

X. "IS HE DEAD YET? – A HOOSIER PIONEER TALE":

AN INCIDENT OF RILEY WITH HIS SISTER RECALLING A "GRANDMOTHER RILEY STORY"

     Lady Alys Meade-Banks was a title Uncle Whitcomb assigned to my mother for several years, and the DruryLane-like melodrama of the roles they both assumed was played out for all their worth. It was a serial, with new episodes occurring each time he called to see us. He also delighted to annex mother as a foil for dramatizing poems and shreds of prose. They both became very intent and oblivious to their surroundings as they hilariously improvised the roles he had selected to read for the occasion. At first, I was so small that I did not know what it was all about, although I was very much interested in the proceedings.

     The first such stage-setting I can remember was when the maid was told to take me upstairs to bed, but, reaching the front hall staircase landing, paused in absent-mindedness, to look back at the lighted dining-room where a curious drama was already underway. Mr. Riley sat at a table, watching mother very intently. He asked, "Well, how do you think she would have said it?" Mother said "Give me your muffler and I’ll show you!" She tied it over her head and knotted it under her chin and next picked up a candlestick from the table to re-light it. Then, assuming a grave expression, she walked softly to a door which she set slightly and noiselessly ajar. I could almost see the light through her slender little hand as she shielded the candle flame. She seemed waiting for something and pointing up an imaginary stairway. When utterly delighted, Mr. Riley had a certain strange laugh – like a violent whispering – and he was laughing like this as I watched. I wondered what so pleased him for, in what he used to call her "south wind voice", my mother was merely inquiring with great sweetness: "Is he dead yet?" as she allowed a weary half-frown to cloud her brow in her effort to pierce the obscurity of the stairs.

     Long after, they explained to me how he had a theory that many so-called even-tempered women were very frequently pretenders. The unruffled manner often masked an often-ruthless violence of nature rarely suspected or discovered by the onlooker. This tale of the early days of which I had witnessed mother’s performance was one which had been told to them by their grandmother Riley, and he thought that it perfectly illustrated this contention of his. He called such women "jars of cream."

       The story ran that a traveler in a strange locality on horseback had asked shelter for the night at an isolated farm. The pioneer farmer and his wife were cordially hospitable, the wife particularly disarming by reason of her gentle sweetness. The traveler was especially impressed by her softly modulated voice. Being weary, he retired early to the bedroom which was assigned him in a loft a half-story up and which was reached by a creaky stairway. Depositing his saddlebags beside his pillow, on the bed, he felt too tired to undress, and threw himself down beside his bags and was soon asleep. Some time later he awakened from a very vivid dream in which his absent wife had so frantically beckoned him to get out of bed and come to her at the one window which was in the loft, that, still half asleep, he obeyed the dream’s summons. As he reached the open window, he became wide awake and was startled to hear stealthy footsteps ascending the stairs, and, suspecting something sinister, and knowing he would have no chance to defend himself, he quietly and hurriedly climbed through and dropped the short distance to the earth beneath. Pausing a minute, he heard the blows of the farmer’s club, as they fell upon the saddlebags in the darkened room above. Then, as he hastily and noiselessly tore loose the bridle from the tree at the side of the house where he had been obliged to tether his horse for the night from the foot of his stairs where the wife was standing, he heard the honeyed accents of the woman sweetly inquiring of her husband: "Is he dead yet?" The rest of the story is familiar to most readers of early Hoosier tales.

XI. UNCLE WHITCOMB AND OTHER WRITERS

     My Uncle Whitcomb believed strongly in forging friendships with other writers.  He believed there was a community of mind which writers participated in.  The craft of writing established its own world to him and invited other writers in.

     Many writers today are unwilling to take the risk or the pains to give constructive criticism to the many who submit for reading so much that is mediocre. I can recall no instance where his generosity in this matter was abused seriously. In any case, he could never refuse such requests, and if any ghost of talent was discernible he encouraged it in heartwarming terms. His heart melted at any appeal of the diffident, for he understood how terribly the timid might be crushed by unmerited rebuff. Letter after letter written by him in answer to some stranger’s demand on him is brimful of the milk of human kindness. Yet, with all his inexhaustible interest in people, he was never guilty of that failing which so often afflicts those of sensitive fineness –the deliberate, almost professional, exercising of influence which intentionally affects the lives of others. The pernicious role of conscious sculptor seeking to mold the pliant was no part of his nature.

     That he did involuntarily exercise influence over others was solely due to his indefatigable search for the lovable, not the pliable, in them. One of the most significant clues to his extraordinary power to attract love to himself is to be found in a letter to Madison Cawein in which he writes: "Go among all kinds of people and love ‘em whether you want to or not. Get rightly acquainted and even the boor’s a gentleman. God gets along with him, it seems. He listens." Even this advice was not given in preachment. It was what he felt was a tendency to specialize in over refinement, which excludes the common man of his doings. Mr. Riley was as incapable of preaching as he was of influencing, in the objectionable sense, mainly because there was not a drop of "moralic acid" in his entire makeup.

     The late Brand Whitlock, our Ambassador to Belgium under Woodrow Wilson, was a longtime friend of Mr. Riley. IN a letter written to me shortly after Mr. Riley’s death, he paid a tribute to the unity which exited in the character of Riley:

"…I had for many long, happy years, the greatest admiration and affection for him (Riley), and was very proud to be honored, as it was my fortune to be, by his friendship.

Art is a personality, and his art so rich, so sincere, so beautiful, was the reflection of his great character, of his own strong, virginal personality."

     If indeed "art is personality", then Mr. Riley’s insistence on keeping close to the human heart in actual life as well as in his verse, accounts for the pied Piper-like following which lovingly trailed his passage through life.

     Meredith Nicholson was among those to recall that he "once committed the indiscretion of uttering a volume of verse" in the early days of his friendship with Mr. Riley and that, shortly after the book’s appearance, he was greatly elated on visiting a local bookstore, to be told by the clerk that one admirer had bought seventy-five copies. Very much interested he inquired more searchingly into the sale and finally discovered the heavy investor in poetry to have been Mr. Riley. At another time, Mr. Riley secretly bought a hundred copies of the work of a young literary aspirant, and sent them, as fits, up and down the land. He always took elaborate pains to conceal such generosities, however. Even with so old a friend as Gene Debs, he preferred to remain anonymous in his financial donation when that friend was once in need of funds for his defense in one of his radical activities. It is well that he did not live to see Debs sent to Atlanta, as it would have grieved him greatly. He was more innocent of acquaintance with the maliciousness of party politics than some child but when Debs was arrested as a socialist, Mr. Riley was indignant with the opposition parties that attacked Debs and said: "Why the man’s a saint! He never hurt anyone!" All who personally knew Debs seem to be of the same opinion.

     It was not in Mr. Riley’s nature to be constructively active in sociological problems of reform although he felt deeply that such problems should somehow be righted. If solicited, he unhesitatingly contributed financially to any cause which purported to help the under-dog. In two instances, he was at pains to write to Governors in petition for pardon for men he believed to be unjustly sentenced to death. The cases were attracting wide attention and he was told that the weight of his name would reinforce the general petitions being sent to the Governors from all sides. However he was without maudlin sentiment about criminals of vicious character.

     Affectation of any sort was anathema to James Whitcomb Riley, but his temper was so capricious that the attitudinizing of some person would at one time enrage him into silence and a baleful glare or on the other hand merely made hi laugh outright in the person’s face with no explanation. Or again he would, with a few incredibly well chosen, cruel words, unsmilingly strip the rags of pretense from the offender.

     More tender-hearted than a woman, he was yet capable of being bitterly unkind, but only if he was made to imagine, or actually discovered, that some one he had hitherto loved and trusted, had been unworthy of his affection. If and when he later discovered that his unkind attitude had been unjust, his remorse was painful. He would agonize to the discomfort of all who were about him, and write the victim of his injustice a letter which was a composite masterpiece of humility, despair or choice invective against the meddling villain responsible for the estrangement! Strangely enough, he was cool-headed, seldom acting from impulse. How often can I recall his telling me: "Never act on impulse!"

     In sharp contract with this ingrained desire to discover only the ideal in people was an equally ingrained suspicion. In certain moods, he would say that there was "no such thing as a friend," and in illustration of a general malaise he thought he detected, he claimed that whenever an adverse paragraph about him was published, even his friends would make sure that it should not escape his attention, carefully clipping it to show him. H said that they would cloak their motive with some such remark as "Mr. Riley! I just can’t say how indignant this made me when I read it!" his inclination to impute secret motives to so many people may not have been without reason, as any famous person attracts a great number of those who are determined in their pursuit of some selfish design.

     I remember thinking that he carried this suspicious strain to an extreme when he once sharply cautioned me not to leave a letter and several correspondence cards (written in French and Italian) on a chair by his side, in the hotel lobby, in Miami where I was his guest. I had just read them, in translation, to him, and I protested mildly his attitude. He patiently explained that he had himself often been the victim of evil-minded persons who delighted to spread damaging lies on the slimmest of pretexts, and he said that the fact that my correspondence was in a language they would not be likely to understand, only furnished such persons with a greater opportunity to exercise their questionable talents!

XII. UNCLE WHITCOMB DRAMATIZES A STABBING INCIDENT

     When I was growing up, I was sometimes blessed to witness my Uncle Whitcomb doing spontaneous acting when he visited our home. On one occasion, the maid and I surreptitiously watched from our box seats on the landing, while Uncle Whitcomb acted out for my mother and himself the tragic story told in Robert Buchanan’s poem "Fra Giacoma." The feeling of subtle menace as he recited the poem, gathered in intensity until the rising passion of his tone caused me to shiver in fright. I have never forgotten the restrained crescendo of his fury as he reached the lines where, maddened by his beautiful wife’s admitted infidelity, he confesses that he has killed her and taunts the guilty monk, her lover, to whom he has also administered the poisoned Montepulciano wine:

"Thank Montepulciano for giving

Your death in such delicate sips;

‘Tis not every monk ceases living

With so pleasant a taste on his lips;

But, let Montepulciano unsurely should kiss.

Take this! And this! And this!"

timing his dagger thrusts to the violence of each staccato "this!" as he stabbed the imaginary monk! Then his strangely sonorous and terrifying voice continued:

"Cover him over, Pietro,

And bury him in the court below -…

And, hark you, then to the convent go –

bid every bell of the convent toll,

And the monks say mass for your mistress’ soul."

     This sort of dramatization of poetry was, however, a departure from the previously described assuming of fictitious and humorous roles he enjoyed laying with friends in his daily contacts.

     Graham Robertson, in his lovable book "Life Was Worth Living", writes of a similar pretending streak in his friend Burne-Jones who he says used to send him letters of fatherly advice as to impossible situations in which of course Mr. Robertson had not found himself. Mr. Robertson also recounts that Wilde delighted his friends with the same type of nonsense, inviting "obviously apocryphal histories of undoubtedly non-existent friends or relations." Mr. Robertson’s mother was quite touched by one such tale of Wilde’s about an "Aunt Jane," and she afterwards remarked: "Poor, dear woman, what a comfort it is to feel quite sure that she never existed." She could never have felt like that about any of Mr. Riley’s pretended characters, however, as his one exaction in all this foolery with friends was that the game must always strike the note of burlesque, never pathos.

   Uncle Whitcomb’s gaiety amounted to genius. There was sorcery in his speech. In his private as well as professional life everyone caught gayety from him just as combustible objects catch fire from flame. He was inevitably the highlight of any party unless some unfortunate note of exploiting him had been introduced. If those who did not know him well happened to have him as a guest at their home and attempted to "show off" with him forcing him into the limelight and expecting him to "entertain with a few recitations" their other guests, he would retire within himself like a suddenly prodded turtle and then leave precipitately. Whoever was his companion for the next hour would be made hysterical as he voiced his acute indignation and a fury in the most eloquently original profanity it is possible to imagine. His swearing was sui generis – but not course or indecent. No one ever thought up such descriptive adjectives nor set them off with quite such roman-candle pyro-technique. He was not trying to be humorous at such times which was one thing that made it so irresistibly funny. He was merely effervescent with irritation. His dear friend was in his life his mother and she made his profanity lyrical.

     His friend, Sir Henry Irving, said of Mr. Riley that he would have been one of the greatest character actors of his time, had he chosen the stage as a career. When Mr. Riley visited London, Sir Henry gave a dinner in his honor at the renowned Old Beefsteak Room in Irving’s own theater, The Lyceum, and requested Mr. Riley to recite for the guest, among whom was the famous French actor Coquelin. After listening to Mr. Riley give a number of his poems, Coquelin agreed with Sir Henry’s opinion and added that: "This Monsieur Riley has, by nature, what it has taken us many years to acquire." A graceful compliment, yes. And a polite exaggeration sounds to a later generation, which never saw nor heard Mr. Riley. Yet Booth Tarkington, who heard him repeatedly and who is a link between Mr. Riley’s and the present generation, has written:

     "Never any other man stood night after night on stage or platform to receive such solid roars of applause for the ‘reading’ poems – and for himself. He did not ‘read’ his poems; he did not ‘recite’ them, either; he took his whole body into his hands, as it were, and by his wizard mastery of suggestion, left no James Whitcomb Riley at all upon the stage; instead, the audience saw and heard whatever the incomparable comedian wished them to see and hear. He held a literally unmatched power over his audience for riotous laughter or for actual copious tears; and no one who ever saw an exhibition of that power will forget it – or him."

     Although he found personal fulfillment in poetry, his love for the theater was probably vicariously expressed through his friendships with so many of the distinguished actors and actresses of his day. Some of the correspondence with these friends has been preserved, and because of the peculiar aliveness which so persistently inform as a letter long after the writer of it has died, it seems eerie to read these letters which speak of theatrical events or plays which from today’s perspective have had a history unanticipated at the time the letters were written. When for instance, James A. Hearne set him a modest note saying:" I would be delighted to have you see my newest and what is said to be my best work, "Shore Acres", and will be pleased to place a box or seats at your disposal", he was then unknowingly alluding to a play of his which was still to be remembered today, forty years late, because in writing it he had succeeded in making it a genuine folk-drama, true to the region it represented.

     The theater is said to be the first love of all poetic minds; certain it is that a love of the theater and all manner of play-acting figured conspicuously in Mr. Riley’s life. In his boyhood he played eternally at "show" with his young contemporaries, and, as a young man, he was a very active member of a dramatic club at Greenfield, an organization, by the way, of no mean merit, from all accounts. Both he and my mother have told me bout this club, and the plays in which they both had appeared. One in particular that amused concerned the stupidity of two men, who, along with other non-members, had been drafted for the occasion to act merely as soldiers to carry off the dead and dying from the battlefield in one scene of the club’s presentation of "A Child of Waterloo". It was the sort of mistake that always happens when amateurs are given important rolls in parts. To hear Mr. Riley tell how he was lying among the wounded when these two supers came in confused and despite his vehemently whispered protests, removed him bodily from the scene was a very funny story. They had continued their conscientious labors until they had deposited him in the wings. As he was not supposed to be dead and had lines to say, there was nothing for it but to have the stretcher-bearers carry him back in and re-deposit him on the battlefield.

     The love of assuming some fantastic play-acting role in ordinary off-stage daily association with friends is, I believe, frequently characteristic of the born actor. To the end of his life, Mr. Riley had a habit of assuming such roles with a few intimates. These characterizations are difficult to describe, and lose sparkle when the attempt is made to pin them down on paper. No "propos" were needed. It was all a matter of conversation, and was likely to take place while out driving with some companion, or even in a barber shop if a friend occupied an adjoining chair. In one Indianapolis restaurant, I recall, the colored waiters became so interested in the comedy at our table that service was demoralized, for they were unwilling to leave the table and ear-short long enough to fill orders at other tables.

     Whoever assisted in the game was usually a passive actor, and an occasional question or assertion was all that was needed to get Mr. Riley well launched in his part. With me, he pretended to be a timid old spinster, "Miss Phoebe," who could never quite accustom herself to the family automobile which had replace the horse and phaeton. I was ‘William" the young roughneck chauffeur. "Miss Phoebe" would start the ball rolling by giving instructions for the morning ride, then, when I would manage to introduce talk of carburetor, spark-plugs, and fly-wheel, "she" would be inspired to the most ludicrous misuse of terms and improvisation on the theme. If I fell out of character and laughed too long at "her" hilarious mistakes, "Miss Phoebe" would, with great dignity reproach the unbecoming levity of her "chauffeur" and I would struggle back to my role of "William."

     With Meredith Nicholson, he became a certain "Brother Balmoozle" or "Brother Brookwarble," even "Brother Passwater," or an even more derisive name of impolite ribaldry. This "Brother" was a sanctimonious itinerant preacher who loved the sound of his own sonorous and toothsome elocution, and who employed the affected pronunciation, so dear to the nouveau-literate, of such words as for-tyune- ate-ly, ee-vil, lect-yure and pict-yure.

     Another friend, expert in the German dialect and as gifted at the game of make-believe as Mr. Riley himself, would impersonate a "Herr Doktor Bicking", who, they pretended was in command of a German submarine reaching our shores during the then world war.    
     To hear the two of them, Mr. Riley took the part of an awed German-American citizen, was vaudeville at its best for each of their lines worked perfect comedy. "Doktor Bicking" would seriously recount the "unspeakable hardships" which he and the crew had endured on the crossing, when their food rations fell short, and breakfast consisted of only sausage, eggs, friend potatoes, steak, rollmops and prunes! The "Doktor" would also sadly relate how he had often been on the bridge for as high as an hour and a half without any food at all. Then, after considerable nautical assininity had embellished the yard, and the subject of the commander’s tragic under-nourishment had been abandoned, their active imaginations would ransack for material the submarine itself, and even the various lives of the wholly fictitious crew, the story growing in newness and variety day by day.

Lady Alys Mead-Banks was a title he assigned to my mother for several years, and the Drury-Lane-like melodrama of the roles they both assumed was played for all they were worth. It was a serial, with new episodes occurring each time he called to see us. He also delighted to annex mother as a foil for dramatizing poems and shreds of prose. They both became very intent and oblivious to their surroundings as they literally improvised the roles he had selected to read for the occasion. At first, I was so small that I did not know what it was all about, although I was very much interested in the proceedings."

XIII. THE PASSING OF THE OUTHOUSE

     It would be exhilarating to hear Uncle Whitcomb's inspired comments on a letter recently received from a self-admitted deserving woman, who, as an "artist", was enthusiastic over her idea to do water color illustrations for a certain widely circulated ribald poem which has falsely been attributed to Mr. Riley for many years.  She applied for copyright permission to use the poem and was shocked to be advised by Mr. Riley's publisher that far from regarding her scheme with exuberance, they would vigorously prosecute her for libel if she circulated her booklet as authored by Mr. Riley.

     Another source of publication refused to correct an assertion that Mr. Riley was the author of this same threnody of smut, on the ground that the poem had been broad sheeted; that collectors believed he had written it; and that a certain dramatic critic of their acquaintance said that his family had known Mr. Riley.  That it seemed automatically settled the matter!. 

     The fact that Mr. Riley himself had repeatedly denied writing the poem is of no importance, apparently.  Nor is the fact significant that the verses can easily be recognized as spurious Riley by anyone familiar with his style.  It is incorrectly assumed that his friends and family repudiate the poem merely because of its questionable taste.  
    Truth to tell, had Mr. Riley really written the poem, it would at least have had the virtue of being funny, and not labouredly dirty, as it patently is.  I am aware that whose who wish to believe Mr. Riley wrote those verses, will continue unchanged in their belief; and I realize too, that still yet another class will consider that in debunking - or rather delousing - this legend, I am robbing Mr. Riley of his only masterpiece, as far as they are concerned.  In any case, there is no reason why the truth should not be told, and it just happens, quite simply, that he is not the author of that poem.

THE PASSING OF THE BACK HOUSE

When memory keeps me company and moves to smile or tears,

A weather-beaten object looms through the mist of years,

Behind the house and barn it stood, a half a mile or more,

And hurrying feet a path had made, straight to its swinging door.

Its architecture was a type of simple classic art,

But in the tragedy of life it played a leading part.

And oft the passing traveler drove slow and heaved a sigh,

To see the modest hired girl slip out with glances shy.

We had our posey garden that the women loved so well;

I loved it too, but better still I loved the stronger smell

That filled the evening breezes so full of homely cheer,

And told the night-o'ertaken tramp that human life was near.

On lazy August afternoons it made a little bower

Delightful, where my grandsirer sat and whiled away an hour.

For there the summer mornings, its very cares entwined,

And berry bushes reddened in the streaming soil behind.

All day fat spiders spun their webs to catch the buzzing flies

That flitted to and from the house, where Ma was baking pies;

And once a swarm of hornets bold had built their palace there,

And stung my unsuspecting Aunt -- I must not tell you where.

My father took a flaming pole -- that was a happy day --

He nearly burned the building up, but the hornets left to stay.

When summer bloom began to fade and winter to carouse,

We banked the little building with a heap of hemlock boughs.

But when the crust is on the snow and sullen skies were gray,

Inside the building was no place where one could wish to stay.

We did our duties promptly, there one purpose swayed the mind;

We tarried not, nor lingered long, on what we left behind.

The torture of the icy seat would make a Spartan sob,

For needs must scrape the flesh with a lacerating cob,

That from a frost-encrusted nail suspended from a string --

My father was a frugal man and wasted not a thing.

When Grandpa had to "go out back" and make his morning call,

We'd bundle up the dear old man with a muffler and a shawl.

I knew the hole on which he sat -- 'twas padded all around,

And once I tried to sit there -- 'twas all too wide I found,

My loins were all too little, and I jack-knifed there to stay,

They had to come and get me out, or I'd have passed away,

My father said ambition was a thing that boys should shun,

And I just used the children's hole 'til childhood days were done.

And still I marvel at the craft that cut those holes so true,

The baby's hole, and the slender hole that fitted Sister Sue,

That dear old country landmark; I tramped around a bit,

And in the lap of luxury my lot has been to sit,

But ere I die I'll eat the fruits of trees I robbed of yore,

Then seek the shanty where my name is carved upon the door.

I ween that old familiar smell will soothe my jaded soul,

I'm now a man, but none the less I'll try the children's hole.

     Because quite false legends are increasingly becoming associated with his name, I should like to mention a few others by way of correction. While I may be able to scotch one or two of these major absurdities, an attempt to overtake the entire collection would be beyond the alterable. They will doubtless continue to multiply with the same prolific abundance as characteristic of the "original" guitars and banjos he is said to have used in his medicine show days. My mother suggested the first dozen of these "original instruments" sold from the various states of the Union led her to believe some businessman was manufacturing them in gross lots!

     Furnishings which he never used, and which never formed any part of the original old Riley Homestead, have somehow been widely advertised and purchased as Riley heirlooms. A most amusing angle to these sales is one which makes it necessary for his intimates to picture Mr. Riley eating daily from gold plated monogrammed china! It is almost as hilarious as the error which pictured him a one time Unites State Consul at the Court of St. James. This incredible misinformation was given in an otherwise unimpeachable magazine. Even the idea of such an official appointment with its intricate minutiae and ramifications, demanding a business ability so conspicuously lacking in Mr. Riley would be enough to send him fleeing to the farthest inaccessible reach of the Elysian Fields where his friends and he now reside.

     As inevitably happens in the case of any famous man, after his death, there are any number of persons, who, in life, actually met the man perhaps twice at a banquet, or when soliciting patronage or funds for some on the innumerable subscriptions that a celebrity is always expected to consider. Such a quarter-hour of acquaintance is frequently magnified into a "life-long" intimacy of friendship after the celebrity’s passing. The real friends and relatives of the dead man are astonished to hear of the most extraordinary eccentricities of conduct and speech, which are reported as fact by these same self-styled friends. Possibly the kindest explanations that such persons eventually deceive themselves into believing the falsehoods they so glibly disseminate. There seems to be, furthermore, as often characteristic of these "intimate" friends, a peculiar wish to belittle the dead man, while, at the same time they bask and preen themselves in the transient spotlight focused on them by reflection from the celebrity's halo of fame.

XIV. AN INCIDENT OF THE EFFECT OF HIS PARALYSIS

     In the later years of his life, after several strokes had partially paralyzed and made him almost helpless, Uncle Whitcomb was made somewhat uneasy by the concerted visit of an entire school, or grade, when teachers and pupils wished to honor him in some manner.  Although his poise was equal to the occasion, such visits, en masse, made him feel as if he were an exhibit - like a museum piece - and unavoidably place him in a false position with his young visitors.

     That he was not displeased by the attention was evidence to me once when I was his guest for the winter at a southern hotel.  I was amazed at his patience and graciousness toward the innumerable strangers who so continually accosted him and interrupted his goings and comings about the place.  Not only was he approached the minute he entered the foyer or dining room, but also if we were parked in the car on some street for a few minutes, some stranger invariably wished to shake his hand.  I finally said: "How on earth do you stand it?" He replied that the occasional crank was hard to bear, but that the others were merely being friendly, in their way, and that it was an honor to have a stranger tell you he enjoyed your writings.  The least you could do was to acknowledge the courtesy.

     Because he has been given the title of "The Children's Poet", and because his verse so clearly shows his unusual understanding of childhood, those who did not know him often assume that he was a grandfatherly sort of person who spoiled and petted every child he met.  Nothing could be less like him.  He loved all children, but he loved them singly.  He never fondled them, and they seemed never to wish more than a quiet leaning against his knee or sitting at his feet.  With all his dignity he could sometimes prankishly enjoy making a child misbehave behind its parent's back as upon the occasion when, at a friend's house, he adroitly managed to demoralize the three children at dinner by making hideous faces at them.  The parents were unaware of his part in the proceedings, and were extremely chagrined by the outrageous behavior of the children who were trying to outdo each other in making atrocious grimaces at the guest!  Finally, one of the exasperated parents ordered them to leave the table and go to bed, at which one child inquired with reasonable bitterness why Mr. Riley also was not sent to bed.

XV. THE RILEY FAMILY GENEALOGY

     James Whitcomb Riley had a number of mild eccentricities and gentle superstitions and these made him fair game for those who like to reminisce about him in fantastic vein. "Reputation depends on the balance struck by everyone, between truth that limps and a falsehood to which wit gives wings".  These reflect his genealogy.

     A strong Celtic strain accounts for much that was puzzling in his personality. His mother was descended from French Huguenots who had fled from persecution to Wales. There was also Celtic blood in his father Captain Riley’s ancestors. The mystic was strangely blended in him. At only one time in his life did he seriously attempt deliberate probing into the occult and that was a short series of table-tipping, automatic writing experiments which he tried in company with my mother (then a girl) and with his valued older friend Mary Hartwell Catherwood. These were shortly discontinued. He disliked the shoddiness and inanities of the usual séance-room and never seriously dabbled with them, although he was tolerant of his friends’ interest in such matters and occasionally joined some friendly table-tipping group when importuned.

     He was so certain that death "opens on the dawn" that he felt no need to bolster his conviction with the - to him – puerile seeking after proof via the trumpet and spirit-control of some medium. His faith in continued life was simple and unshakable, nor was it an escape mechanism. As the materialists have as yet to prove that there exists no survival after death, his belief needs no apology. Faith is indeed "an oasis in the heart which will never be reached by the caravan of thinking.

     Uncle Whitcomb believed with absolute conviction in the existence of Elfin Folk – and the affectionate condescension with which his friends tolerated this belief amused him. He was in no way concerned as to what people thought of this, but was as calm and assertive of their existence as are several of Ireland’s distinguished present-day poets.

     Uncle Whitcomb knew them well because he grew up with them. There were elves, pixies, fairies, wunks, "black things," goblins, squidjicum squeezes and many other fanciful spirits from another world everywhere this child of the Hoosier frontier went.

     This world of the "elfin folk" was the real world to James Whitcomb Riley. He retired to it with his inmost thoughts and even wrote of this world in "The Flying Islands of the Night," his great biographical poem. His world with the elves was a world he could understand because he saw himself as a spiritual entity like an elf is, quite fancifully and with selves like "Jucklet," "Spraivall," and "Crestillomeem."
     Following is one of Riley's "Elfin" pieces:

Puck

O it was Puck!  I saw him yesternight

Swung up betwixt a phlox-top and the rim

Of a low crescent moon that cradled him,

Whirring his rakish wings with all his might

And pursing his wee mouth, that dimpled white

And red, as though some dagger keen and slim

Had stung him there, while ever faint and dim,

His eery warblings piped his high delight,

Till I, grown jubilant, shrill answer made,

AT which all suddenly he dropped from view

And peering after, 'neath the everglade,

What was it, do you think, I saw him do?

I saw him peeling dewdrops with a blade

Of starshine sharpened on his hat-wing shoe.

XVI. JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY WAS ACCIDENT PRONE WITH HORSES

    
     At one time, when he had been visiting us for several weeks, Uncle Whitcomb called a strange cab, on leaving, and, as he was waiting inside the closed vehicle while the driver disposed his hand luggage, several horseback riders entered the peaceful street.   As soon as they arrived abreast the cab, one of the horses took sudden inexplicable fright and danced over, despite its rider’s every effort, and proceeded to kick in the side of the cabin in which Mr. Riley was concealed.  This exercise once over, it at once calmed down and continued peacefully on its way! On another occasion when he and my mother were driving along, mother argued that his fear of horses made him imaginative as to their dislike of him.  She cautiously slipped the reins into his hands to prove that the horse would not know the difference.  At once, it was as if the animal had been bee-stung, for it flattened its ears and took the bit between its teeth and headed straight for eternity Mother recovered the reins and finally succeeded in getting the animal under control.  Whatever the coincidence, she never repeated the experiment.  When she was a young girl, he told me that she used to dismay him because of her risky escapades in riding an ugly tempered Indian pony.  He said that he never saw her start out on this very spirited army horse, that he did not fully expect him “to be returned to his family like a bag of spoiled peaches.”

XVII. MY UNCLE WITH CATS AND DOGS

     If a not unnatural constraint marked his attitude toward horses, his relations with cats and dogs were happily uneventful of any similar “hoodoo.”  He once had a very remarkable Maltese cat whose intelligent antics he truthfully chronicled in the child-poem “Find the Favorite.”
     A very spoiled little French poodle named Lockerbie, after the Street on which he lived, was the lively companion of his last years.  She looked like an ambulant white muff until she fastened her beady little eyes on you, at which moment you became aware that you were being as searchingly appraised as by some dowager Countess from the exclusive circle of th4e old Faubourg Saint Germain!
     On her first visit to Miami, Lockerbie cautiously alighted from the car, better to examine the Atlantic Ocean, which she was seeing for the first time with a none too approving regard.  Her difficult passage across the soft strip of sand put her in an irritable frame of mind, which was in no way lessened when she reached the shore and discovered that the waves insolently continued to roll in and ripple about her paws despite her angry protest.  Decidedly it was too wet and ill mannered, so, with a few growling comments of blistering sarcasm, she contemptuously turned her back on it and retraced her steps to Mr. Riley and the parked car.  Her indignation at acquiring an enterprising sand flea and a few sand burrs on the return trek was the last straw and nothing would ever again induce her to put paw to sand or beach on any subsequent visit of any year.
     Lockerbie was a decided personage and her likes and dislikes were very marked.  Every evening, while in Miami, for an hour before bedtime, the three of us would have a boisterous romp in his room, Mr. Riley’s part necessarily being limited but nevertheless fairly active.  He waved his good arm and watched his change to trip, with his unparalyzed foot, the little dog as she flew past his chair.
     Fortunately his suite was on the ground floor of the hotel and so situated that our nightly uproar escaped complaint.  Various callers would at times interrupt the scene to our mutual regret.  The most frequent was an elderly lady of considerable corpulence and self-importance.  She was also from Indiana, and we, therefore, felt a greater need of polite tolerance of her gossipy advent.  Lockerbie would have none of her, however.  She would not suffer her head to be petted by the fat, bejeweled hand, but retired to an aloof distance and watched hopefully for signs of her leaving.  When the woman would eventually rise to go, Lockerbie invariably sidled around to a special vantage point by the door, and, just as it would close on the departing bore, she would lunge violently at the woman’s vanishing ankle and attempt to force her to exist more speedily.  Patiently she did not wish to injure the woman, but she had such deliberate intent in her well-timed gesture of discourtesy that it was ludicrous.  It is perfectly expressed our own repressed sentiments that we could hardly restrain our desire to shout.

      Shortly upon her acquaintance with me I began speaking to Lockerbie in French, for no reason except that I had only just returned from years of residence in France, where it had become natural for me to address all dogs in French.  The unexpected result was so amusing that Mr. Riley often asked me to talk to her in French before visitors so as to show them how strangely it affected the dog.  She wriggled with delight and would dance across the floor to me on her hind paws, although she had never been taught the trick now was I asking her to perform.  She very plainly like