Page:Henry B. Fuller - Bertram Cope's Year, 1919.djvu/190

 "Heavens!" said Cope. "I am not an author—still less an improvissatore."

"I am sure you could be," returned Medora fondly. "Just try."

Cope sat down again and began to run his eye uncomfortably about the room, as if dredging the air for an idea. Behind one corner of a mirror was a large bunch of drying leaves. They had been brought in from the sand dunes as a decorative souvenir of the autumn, and had kept their place through mere inertia: an oak bough, once crimson and russet; a convoluted length of bittersweet, to which a few split berries still clung; and a branch of sassafras, with its intriguing variety of leaves—a branch selected, in fact, because it gave, within narrow compass, the plant's entire scope and repertoire as to foliage.

Cope caught at the sassafras as a falling balloonist catches at his parachute.

"Well," he said, still reluctant and fumbling, "perhaps I can devise a legend: the Legend, let us say, of the Sassafras Bush."

"Good!" cried Medora heartily.

Pearson, whispering to Amy Leffingwell, gave little heed to Cope and his strained endeavor to please Mrs. Phillips. Foster, quite passive, listened with curiosity for what might come.

"Or perhaps you would prefer folk-lore," Cope went on. "Why the Sassafras has Three Kinds of Leaves, or something like that."

"Better yet!" exclaimed Medora. "Listen,