Page:In Lockerbie Street.djvu/29

 excited group, and Mr. Riley coming up asked, "What's the matter?" When they told him, he drew back as if warding off a blow. "Oh!" he said, "Lockerbie Street suits me just as it is." And his eye swept its length even to the grocery at the corner, plastered grotesquely with blue and yellow and green advertisements for soap and bread.

"Now I want to know," said the lady from the house at the end of the row, "do you like to walk the curb in rainy weather to keep out of the sidewalk mud puddles?"

"I've learned to," answered Mr. Riley cheerfully. Finally the will of the majority of the property owners prevailed. Their protest to the Indianapolis city officials was effectual, and they are left with their own in Lockerbie Street, unchanged as they want it.

So it is still known as Lover's Lane, where young people like to wander under the thick leafy shade on summer evenings. Through the low French windows of the unlighted drawing room where he sits, Mr. Riley sometimes hears their comments.

"I wonder if he's married," asks a girl, looking toward the house. "Sure," answers the young man, with an arm around her waist, "didn't he write that 'Old Sweetheart of Mine? And the author laughs to himself a little low laugh in the moonlight.

Nobody knows but Mr. Riley why he didn't marry. And he won't tell. It is one of the marks of his genius that he can look at life even without having lived it and see himself as the other man is. Yet somehow you feel that there should have been somewhere a girl of whom he was thinking when he painted the poem. Down around Greenfield there used to be a number of girls, Lizzie and Annie and Nell and Louise and Mollie. And sometimes now you meet there nice matronly women who look up quickly when you put the question, "Were you ever an old sweetheart of James Whitcomb Riley?" Then their cheeks grow girlishly pink as they admit, "Why yes, I believe I was a long time ago."