Shaynor. As dreamers
accept and explain the upheaval of landscapes and the resurrection of the
dead, with excerpts from the evening hymn or the multiplication-table, so
I had accepted the facts, whatever they might be, that I should witness,
and had devised a theory, sane and plausible to my mind, that explained
them all. Nay, I was even in advance of my facts, walking hurriedly before
them, assured that they would fit my theory. And all that I now recall of
that epoch-making theory are the lofty words: "If he has read Keats it's
the chloric-ether. If he hasn't, it's the identical bacillus, or Hertzian
wave of tuberculosis, _plus_ Fanny Brand and the professional status
which, in conjunction with the main-stream of subconscious thought common
to all mankind, has thrown up temporarily an induced Keats."
Mr. Shaynor returned to his work, erasing and rewriting as before with
swiftness. Two or three blank pages he tossed aside. Then he wrote,
muttering:
The little smoke of a candle that goes out.
"No," he muttered. "Little smoke--little smoke--little smoke. What else?"
He thrust his chin forward toward the advertisement, whereunder the last
of the Blaudett's Cathedral pastilles fumed in its holder. "Ah!" Then with
relief:--
The little smoke that dies in moonlight cold.
Evidently he was snared by the rhymes of his first verse, for he wrote and
rewrote "gold--cold--mould" many times.
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