Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 15.djvu/287

 ostensibly to look after the pony, or after the bottle, I'm not sure which. Anyhow, the pony charged his hardship with unlooked-for equine ferocity, apparently for no other reason than that Sam had once lampooned the whole Cayuse species in a poem published in the Overland. Fortunately for the poet, the steed brought up at the end of his tether and our bard was spared to write and run again.

Our examination of the caves next day was only cursory and perfunctory, and didn't tend to confirm my hope that a literary masterpiece, somewhat after George D. Prentice's immortal tribute to Mammoth Cave, would be the result. Simpson did subsequently write a piece of fiction that dealt with his trip to the caves, but it was too full of fiction to be of any worth as a description of the place, and was hardly worthy of the author of "The Lost Cabin."

On our return to my place of residence, I prevailed on Sam to stop over with me for the winter and try to get out an edition of his poems. This he readily assented to, but, to my surprise, he confessed that he did not have a single scrap of one of his poems with him. Fortunately I had many of his choicer pieces pasted away for my own personal enjoyment, and these became a nucleus to begin with. We gathered up some in the neighborhood, and his sister sent him some we didn't have. But it was the understanding between us that he was to get his muse, his Pegasus, his divine afflatus, or whatever we may choose to call it, in working order and swell the volume with new gems fresh from the mint. As a preliminary he started in reading all the books in my library, and many of them were first-class poetical works, like Homer, Virgil, Pope, Byron, Wordsworth, Praed, Swinburne and others. Beside, I had some classical works that were all Greek, or Latin, which was just as bad, to me, but of splendid service to a man of his education. He very soon made me aware of the fact that he was an omnivorous reader. Book after book was gone through, and yet no addition to the volume of original verse. I tried to encourage him to get down to business, even though he didn't produce something equal to his best.