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used the words ‘tasks’ and ‘erect’ as if they rhymed.
This troubled me a good deal.
My prayer was, ‘God help the fool.’
”
“May 20. My trouble of mind about the deficient verse woke me at 6.30 A. M. I tossed about and wondered how I could lie still until 7.30, my usual time for rising.
The time passed somehow.
I could not think of any correction to make in my verse.
Hoped that I should find that I had not written it as I feared.
When I came to look at it, there it was. Instantly a line with a proper rhyme presented itself to my mind.
To add to my trouble I had lost the address to which I had sent the poem.
My granddaughter, Julia Richards, undertook to interview the Syndicate by longdistance telephone, and, failing this, to telegraph the new line for me. So I left all in her hands.
When I returned, she met me with a smile and said, ‘It is all right, Grandmother.’
She had gone out, found a New York directory, guessed at the Syndicate, got the correspondent, and put her in possession of the new line.
I was greatly relieved.
I have been living lately with work running after me all the time.
Must now have a breathing spell.
Have still my ‘Simplicity’ screed to complete.”
The Authors' Club celebrated her eighty-sixth birthday by a charming festival, modelled on the Welsh Eistedfodd, “at which every bard of that nation brought four lines of verse — a sort of four-leaved clover — to his chief.”
1 Sixty quatrains made what
1 T. W. Higginson, The Outlook, January 26, 1907.
Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston and New York. 1916.
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