Midland Empire News from Billings, Montana • 25

$tp! tilings (Basrffe ---is 5 The Janitor Boy Continued from page two be of the same mind as the rose. She yielded in good nature, but let us thank God that she lapses back to the lour petal arrangement whenever opportunity offers. Stationed in the wilderness, she retains her lovely diameters and hues and the attar of Eden. In the Wilderness she passes on the sanctified design to the buds and then contentedly, Withers. "Lava Lane" was the expression of a desire to ruffle the leaves of a faded atlas.

I marched down the steps of the seven degrees of mournfulncss to reach the site. On the way I passed Mr. Edison and saw him viewing with great reverence the advancing lanterns of the fireflies, and Mr. Ford, pondering over the spool of a wall spider. Words by the crateful were discarded, impressions turned inside out, vagrant ideas taken into bypaths, tripped and ransacked.

It was the most natural thing to think of an ember falling and becoming a world. My old Johnson's Cyclopedia held that part, although two volumes were missing. From that source I learned that the hyena limps with his left hind leg (Animal Fables), a most instructive fact. "God on a Sunday Morning" was written from a feeling that the deity's supreme gentleness is revealed in the utmost intimateness to children, and that God himself created the underpinning for all divine comedies, even down to the laughter of juveniles. 1 Sometimes I think that we are always surrounded by symbols clews from the gardens of the Province of Poetry and that these symbols are embodied in human guise; the pencil seller on the street may be an angel, reporting directly to Heaven as to our general deportment and generosity; the organ grinder who visits the city streets may not be an old Italian music maker.

If we could push reality aside as we push a vision aside, we might perceive a seer from the Palatine in an ambuscade of the commonplace. It seems possible, i There were the martyrs, burned at the stake. To us their agonies were actual. Very likely in their own consciousness and Heaven's beneficence, they were strapped to rose bushes. S.

Youth has its own philosophy, founded upon that of the butterfly. The butterfly begs for no extension of time, but wafts willingly on the heels of any sunset. Its soul longs for no other conveyance than its own wings; its contentment is born of an ancestral assurance. This assurance is not built on verbal instruction. It is a verity in the butterfly's brain.

If the butterfly's brain can hold one verity it can hold two. Admitting one verity, we have the Province's explanation of the natural and happy orientation in the cycles of the winged image. In 1926 a home -town newspaper intimated that I did not write my own poetry. They thought that somebody else wrote my sets, or that a clique connived and used my name for some unexplained reason. It was insisted that I was too young to do the work.

Is it needful for me to say that I wrote my own poems, from the first page of "The Janitor's Boy" to the last page of a new book called "Venus I wrote them. No one helped rr.e, because I never asked any one to help me. It was a joy to go walking in the Province. Many poets were asked if they had written my lines. They said they had not.

We did not even know these poets at the time. Now we know many of them, and we honor them, i But the accusers. Theychallenged a mild conception, strung" through the millennium, the conception that the quickly as possible to see what was causing the stir. She surmised that I had inadvertently vexed some one. The first Sunday of the accusation period I was in church when the minister said: "Those who live by the sword shall perish by the sword." We are an army family, and I knew what that meant.

Thereafter I was sorrowful for my accusers. Had they come to our home in a true spirit, I would have shown them the saber, the drum and the cross-bow on the walls, and would have said that they were not for them. My father soothed me after this fash-Ion: "You're a good soldier. A regiment, after a year in the field, should be able to sustain fire. In the old days of the frontier, with the Indians prominent, girls grew up with their hands on their heads.

The first thing in the morning they felt for their curls. They were none the worse for hearing the jingle of the ramrod or for seeing an arrow come over to plant an ember on the roof. In fact, we might not have done so well in the last war but for some of the heiresses of the old frontier heroines." The thought of the frontier girls going around holding on to their hair was inspiring. Throughout the prolonged attack my thoughts were chiefly upon finding a fitting heroine among those of the pioneer epoch. I desired a particularly noble example.

I found her Hannah Dustin, of Haverhill. She had been captured in a raid by the red men. She was mourned as dead. But one morning in the late summer, or thereabout, she strolled into the stockade of Haverhill. She had brought back the caps of eleven tawnies.

Barring the incident connected witn the headgear, the story was entrancing. While the arrows were coming over, and while the ramrods were performing their ruthless function, I began my poem of the frontier girls. It opened with Hannah Dustin entering the stockade, sentries in buckskin saluting. In the second set the blockhouse drum breaks into the long roll; children scream, "See what she's got!" elders weep with joy; one good dame runs for a noggin of rum and another for a claddy for Hannah, The sets went on, even to the barbaric nailing of the souvenirs of the sachems to tne wall. In the third set the papaws that grow beside the Merrimac River state from personal observation how she missioned them one by one, a cold and cruel deed, but to be excused in a frontier heroine.

In the fourth set the thimble berries are throwing their caps away, an exceedingly distasteful jest, and in the fifth set the shrubberies along the trail of retreat voice their astonishment: Sumachs gather in clusters there. Red with their laughter still; Who is the great evangelist? Hannah of Haverhill. Working over a frontier girl and her trying experience lessened the crash of the volleys. Long before the sets were finished I realized that there was an atmosphere about them suited only to a Colonial period. I felt certain that Mistress Hannah's eleven acts did not make the outlying tribes feel moro friendly; that there was grief in wigwams, and that shame camped in the gloomy eyes of the Iroquois.

Nevertheless, sometime I am going to Haverhill and over the trail. The sets were finished and laid away; in my desk. Only to-day were they, drawn out, read and returned to drawer. As to the so-called "accusers," I hope they realize that there is no resentment on my part. I thank them for having read my verse.

If a young person exonerate any one, I exonerate them and praise them for their courage. They thought they were attacking mfu authorship. In reality, I imagine, theflf were attacking the Province of Poetry. TA Silhouette of Nathalia Crane The Flathouse Roof By Nathalia Crane I linger on the flathouse roof, the moonlight is divine. But my heart is all a-flutter, like the washing on the line I long to be a heroine, I long to be serene, But my feet, they dance in answer to a distant tambourine.

And, oh! The dreams of ecstasy. Oh! Babylon and Troy I I've a hero in the basement, he's the janitor's red-haired boy. There's the music of his mallet and the jigging of his saw; I wonder what he's making on that lovely cellar floor He loves me, for he said it when we met upon the stair; And that is why I'm on the roof to get a breath of air. He said it! Oh! He said it! And the only thing I said Was, "Roger Jones, I like you, for your hair is very red." We parted when intruders came a-tramping through the hall; He's got my pocket handkerchief and I have got his ball. And so it is I'm on the roof.

Oh! Babylon and Troy! I'm very sure that I'm in love with some one else's boy. Alone, upon the starry heights, I'm dancing on a green, To the jingling and the jangling of a distant tambourine, To the stamping of a hammer and the jigging of a saw, And the secret sort of feeling I'm in love forevcrmore. Do you think it's any wonder, with the moonlight so divine, That my heart is all a-flutter, like the washing on the line? Reprinted from "The Janitor's Boy and Other Poems," published bj Thomas Seltzer, New York possession of a verity has nothing to do with human reason, even if it is in the butterfly's brain and the cerebrum of the orchid; that in all youth, the mere suggestion of such an occupant in the cranium is to be ignored; that it ha3 nothing to do with the reasoning capacities or uncanny perspectives of the past. They insisted that a girl, raised in a household with an army and navy background of ancestors, ought not to have any admiration for the Old Guard going up the hill at Waterloo. They seemed certain that there were no books in our house, except presentation copies of N.

Crane's rhymes, probably sent by the "clique." Nevertheless, there was great confusion in our home at the time. But for our belief that soldiers and soldiers' daughters must be steady under fire, we might have whimpered about persecution. At intervals during the attack, we felt like going away into the mountains and staying there forever and ever. Mother read all my verse over as.