Mabel Potter Daggett

“ Igoe feeds the ducks bran till they are full to their necks, to stop their quacking. It may last for hours, perhaps all night. And Mr. Riley neither eats nor sleeps. But when he comes down from the heights where he's been, he holds a revelation that is vital with the throb of life. And people who love Riley and his wonderful verse believe that God still meets his chosen seers on the mountain top of transfiguration, even in Lockerbie Street. ”

“ Nothing less attractive than a trip to Greenfield lures Mr. Riley out of Lockerbie Street. He never takes a vacation. "There isn't so much in a vacation as some folks think," he says. "I like home best." It is with the greatest difficulty that he can be induced to go anywhere, even in Indianapolis. Hostesses at high functions lament the absence of the celebrity they'd planned to lionize. He simply won't accept their invitations. But let Trustin Igoe call out of the side window, "I say, J. W., there's 'wortermelon' at our house this evenin'. ”

“ There is so little hurrying that the grass finds time to grow soft green fringes between the red bricks of the humpety-bumpety sidewalks. The dark cool branches of the trees lock and lovingly interlace above the gravel roadway that fairly runs into a tiny Dame Trot cottage, standing right in its path at the end of the single block. ”

“ Riley why he didn't marry. And he won't tell. It is one of the marks of his genius that he can look at life even without having lived it and see himself as the other man is. Yet somehow you feel that there should have been somewhere a girl of whom he was thinking when he painted the poem. Down around Greenfield there used to be a number of girls, Lizzie and Annie and Nell and Louise and Mollie. And sometimes now you meet there nice matronly women who look up quickly when you put the question, "Were you ever an old sweetheart of James Whitcomb Riley?" ”

“ People who live next door do not stand off as he passes and nudge each other and say in loud whispers, "There goes Riley." That thing elsewhere gets on his nerves. It's fine to be famous, but it's frightful to be forever on parade as a superhuman. It's like a man wearing a dress suit every day and not daring to bend for fear his smooth shiny shirt front might crack. See? Riley does.
In Lockerbie Street he is one of the folks. His life is linked with others by daily accustomed association. He can saunter into Trustin
"Out in Greenfield . ”

“ There's one poem prayer, if he never prayed another, would just about open the gates of heaven. When he walks among the flowers, too, he looks at them with long, long looks filled with a poet's reverent adoration at the mystery of their creation. He likes hollyhocks. "Not the new-fangled, ruffled ones," he says, "but plain ones, with room for a bee to get in and buzz, just as when I was a boy I used to catch 'em in there and hold 'em to hear 'em sing."
*⁠*⁠*
"In Lockerbie Street he is one of the folks." ”

“ He likes that. There aren't many people left now to call him Jim.
Much as he enjoys playing at being a boy, though, there are times when he can't. Not long ago he met Trustin Igoe coming out of his yard one morning and said, "Lord, Trustin, what you going to raise next? Those ducks are just about more'n I can stand!" Mr. Igoe has had dogs and cats and chickens and pigeons and ducks. And the pigeons coo over Mr. Riley's chamber window and the ducks quack under it.
"Why, J. W! Thought you was raised in rural scenes," Mr. Igoe answers. Ah, he was. But then he was a boy, and now he's a poet. ”

“ It's the greatest embarrassment to both for grown people to make the introduction. He doesn't at all enjoy having Mary or Johnny trotted into the parlor in best clothes to recite "Orphant Annie" to him. ”

“ Riley. "So I packed up and pulled out before folks had a chance to say, 'Um, he learned that from Jim.'" Afterward for a while Mr. Riley lived at a hotel. Then his most intimate friend, Major Holstein, an Indianapolis lawyer who also wrote sonnets, said, "Come and live at our house." And he has been there ever since. He seldom goes away when he can help it. Here is home. He has no other.
*⁠*⁠*
Out at Greenfield, a town twenty miles distant, he owns a house. ”