Contrary Mary

I gave it in my best manner, standing in the center of the circle. I

did not expect applause. But I got more than applause. I am not going

to try to describe the look that came into the eyes of the oldest

boy--the nearest that I can come to it is to say that it was the look

of a child waked from a deep sleep, and gazing wide-eyed upon a new

world.

He came straight toward me. "Where--did you--git--them words?" he

asked in a breathless sort of way.

"A man wrote them--a man named Noyes."

"Are they true?"

"Yes."

"Say them again."

It was not a request. It was a command. And I did say them, and saw a

soul's awakening.

Oh, there are people who won't believe that it can be done like

that--in a moment. But that boy was ready. He had dreamed and until

now no one had ever put the dreams into words for him. He cannot read,

has probably never heard a fairy tale--the lore of this region is

gruesome and ghostly, rather than lovely and poetic.

Perhaps, 'way back, five, six generations, some ancestor of this lad

may have drifted into London town, perhaps the bells sang to him, and

subconsciously this sand-hill child was illumined by that inherited

memory. Somewhere in the back of his mind bells have been chiming, and

he has not known enough to call them bells. However that may be, my

verses revealed to him a new heaven and a new earth.

Without knowing anything, he is ready for everything. Perhaps there

are others like him. Cousin Patty says there are girls. She insists

that the girls need cook-books, not poetry, but I am not sure.

I shall go again to the pines, and teach that boy first by telling him

things, then I shall take books. I haven't been as interested in

anything for years as I am in that boy.

So, will you think of me as seeing, faintly, the Vision? Your eyes are

clearer than mine. You can see farther; and what you see, will you

tell me?

And now about Barry. I know how hard it is to have him leave you, and

that under all your talk of trumpets blowing and flags flying, there's

the ache and the heart-break. I cannot see why such things should come

to you. The rest of us probably deserve what we get. But you--I

should like to think of you always as in a garden--you have the power

to make things bloom. You have even quickened the dry dust of my own

dead life, so that now in it there's a little plot of the pansies of my

thoughts of you, and there's rosemary, for remembrance, and there's the

little bed of my interest in that boy--what seeds did you plant for it?