Page:Famous Single Poems (1924).djvu/231

 to get no material benefit from the poem, but that he was in danger of having the laurels of authorship snatched from his brow. He had not signed his name to the poem when he sent it to Harper’s Weekly, and it had appeared there anonymously. That was the general custom in those days, and Mr. Butler had an added reason for withholding his name—or thought he had! As he himself puts it, “I feared that if I were known to be the writer of verses, it might injure my standing as a lawyer. Members of my profession were permitted to make politics an adjunct of their practice at the bar, but dalliance with the Muse and dabbling in verses were apt to come under the ban of a commercial clientage.”

The consequence was that a number of claimants to the authorship soon came forward. The most annoying of these—annoying because her youth and her sex gave her an advantage and won a certain sympathy—was a girl of fifteen named Peck. Her story, confirmed by her father, was to the effect that about a year previously she had been wandering through the woods near her home in the outskirts of New York, and accidentally tore the skirt of her dress. “There, now, I have nothing to wear!” she had exclaimed vexedly, but this exclamation was followed by the reflection, “How many are in the habit of declaring that they have nothing