He told me all about it one afternoon as I walked homeward with him, intent upon finding out why he had suddenly ceased to get his lessons.
"I'm going to write a song," he told me, "and it's going to make me famous. I'm writing it now, and I tell you it's fine."
"Tell me about it, Johnny," I replied. "What is its theme? And how much of it have you written?"
"I don't know what it's to be about," he answered, "if that's what you mean by its theme. But it's going to be great, and I'm going to make the tune to it myself."
"Very well," I replied encouragingly. "Would you mind reciting to me so much of it as you've written? I'd like to hear it."
"Why, of course. I tell you it's going to be great, but I haven't got much of it done yet--only one line, in fact."
Observing a certain discouragement in his tone I responded:
"Oh, well, even one line is a good deal, if it's good. Many a poem's fortune has been made by a single line. Tell me what it is."
"Well, the line runs: 'With a pitcher of buttermilk under her arm.' Don't you see how it sort o' sings? 'With a pitcher of buttermilk under her arm'--why, it's great, I tell you. Confound the school books! What's the use of drudging when a fellow has got it in him to write poetry like that? 'With a pit-cher of but-termilk un-der her arm'--don't it sing? 'With a _pit_-cher of but-termilk un-der her arm.' 'With a _pit_-cher of _but_-termilk--un-der her arm.' Whoopee, but it's great!"
I lost sight of Johnny soon after that, and I have never heard what became of that buttermilk pitcher, or the fascinating rhythm in which it presented itself. But in later years I have come into contact with many literary ambitions that were scarcely better based than this. Indeed, if I were minded to be cynical--as I am not--I might mention a few magazine poets whose pitchers of buttermilk seem to me--but all that is foreign to the purpose of this book.
Before quitting this chapter and the period and region to which it relates, I wish to record that Charley Grebe mastered the mathematics he needed, and entered hopefully upon his apprenticeship to a ship carpenter. I hope he rose to the top in the trade, but I know nothing about it.
Not many months after my school-teaching experience came to an end, circumstances decreed that my life should be changed in the most radical way possible in this country. I quitted the rapidly developing, cosmopolitan, kaleidoscopic West, and became a dweller upon the old family plantation in Virginia, where my race had been bred and nurtured ever since 1635 when the first man of my name to cross the seas established himself there and possessed himself of lavishly abundant acres which subsequent divisions among his descendants had converted into two adjoining plantations--the ancestral homes of all the Egglestons, so far, at least, as I knew them or knew of them.