It made me a nine days' wonder with the students. I caught the men
staring at me, the girls shyly observing me, as I strode from class room
to class room....
But the reek of the stable. It went with me like a ghost everywhere.
Maybe it was because I had no change of suits ... I saw that it was
noticeable to others, and I sat 'way back, in a seat apart, by myself.
* * * * *
Langworth watched my progress narrowly the first few weeks.
One afternoon as I was passing his house he beckoned me in.
"You're making good, and I'm glad of it ... because they're looking on
you as my protégé ... holding me responsible for you. Munday, in the
Schiller class, tells me you sometimes bring in your daily lesson in
_Wilhelm Tell_, translated into blank verse ... and good stuff, too....
And King says he turns over the most difficult lines in Horace in class
for you to translate and construe."
Langworth had only half the truth from King.
Whenever the latter came upon a passage a little off colour, he put me
on it, chuckling to himself ... he knew I would go right through with it
without hesitation.
* * * * *
About this time I received a letter from William Hayes Ward, editor of
the New York _Independent_. He informed me that he had taken a poem of
mine. And, as indubitable proof, he enclosed a check for five dollars.
Professor Langworth was himself a poet of no mean ability: he was
pleased to hear that I had sold a poem to the _Independent_.
* * * * *
I was sick of being shunned because I carried stable smells about with
me wherever I went.
Also, sanguinely, with the sale of my first poem, I was sure that my
literary career had begun, and that from now on I would be enabled to
earn my living by my pen, and pay my way as a student, too. So I threw
up the job that made me smell so unpleasantly.
* * * * *
The city of Laurel had been, in the early days, in the memory of
settlers yet living a hale life, a pioneer outpost. Through it flowed a
great, muddy river. The flat roofs of its main street still preserved a
frontier appearance. It was surrounded by high, wind-swept bluffs.
They still talked of the Quantrell raid and repeated the story of it ...
and of how the six men were lynched under the bridge that swung over the
dam....
At the time of the slavery agitation its citizens had encouraged the
negroes to escape, had petted them, idealised them as no human beings of
any race should be idealised ... had run schools specially for them
where it was considered an honour for the women of the settlers to
teach.
Now, the great negro population, at first so encouraged, was crowded
into a festering multitude of dilapidated buildings that stood on the
flats close by the region where the river coiled through level acres of
low-lying country. This place was known as the "Bottoms."