Dede and Ferguson, between them, after a patient struggle, taught
Daylight poetry, so that in the end he might have been often
seen, sitting slack in the saddle and dropping down the mountain
trails through the sun-flecked woods, chanting aloud Kipling's
"Tomlinson," or, when sharpening his ax, singing into the
whirling grindstone Henley's "Song of the Sword." Not that he
ever became consummately literary in the way his two teachers
were. Beyond "Fra Lippo Lippi" and "Caliban and Setebos," he
found nothing in Browning, while George Meredith was ever his
despair. It was of his own initiative, however, that he invested
in a violin, and practised so assiduously that in time he and
Dede beguiled many a happy hour playing together after night had
fallen.
So all went well with this well-mated pair. Time never dragged.
There were always new wonderful mornings and still cool twilights
at the end of day; and ever a thousand interests claimed him, and
his interests were shared by her. More thoroughly than he knew,
had he come to a comprehension of the relativity of things. In
this new game he played he found in little things all the
intensities of gratification and desire that he had found in the
frenzied big things when he was a power and rocked half a
continent with the fury of the blows he struck.
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