Page:In Lockerbie Street.djvu/21

 are all so human that you can almost hear their hearts beat. Anyhow, a poet can.

He lives at the large house, where in spite of the well-kept lawn that a negro servant tends to with care, there is an air of faded gentility about the brick residence that seems its apology to the rest for having terraced



stone steps and flower urns that they lack. People call it the Riley house. But he wishes they wouldn't. It isn't his.

"Why, they only let me stay here," he explains. Once he lived with a married sister. But there was a boy growing up there, of whom his uncle was fond, and "I've got some few eccentricities it wouldn't be good for a boy to get," says Mr. Riley. "So I packed up and pulled out before folks had