Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 15.djvu/288

 "You think you must not write anything unless it is as good as 'The Beautiful Willamette, I remarked to him, one day. "That has exercised a sort of tyranny over me," was the reply.

For the first time, perhaps, in many years, our favorite bard was now thoroughly sobered up and continued so all winter, for the very sufficient reason that there was nothing there of an intoxicating nature for him to get hold of, and he didn't have ready cash enough about him to buy even a plug of tobacco, though he craved it intensely. It was no doubt the most abstemious period of his life. But it was the making of a man of him once more; he felt it and talked it. With a little financial assistance just at that moment, he might have stood forth rehabilitated and strong enough to ward off temptation. I know from his conversation that this was what he looked forward to with keenest hope. But no matter how excellent poetry he might write, the market seemed completely stalled, so far as his offerings were concerned. In the language of another singer no doubt similarly circumstanced, he might have exclaimed:

He took a notion at one time that he would help me in my work of making rails. Not a very brilliant vocation of course, for a man of his brilliancy, who had been used to drawing a one-hundred-and-fifty-dollar salary as a writer on Bancroft's History of the Pacific Coast, but it showed good intentions. Abraham Lincoln had made rails successfully, and had rode on that reputation largely, into the White House; why, then, should an Oregon poet scorn such an humble task? But his judgment in selecting rail timber I could not commend. He went out one day alone, and cut down and cut up a tree that would just about twist clear around in the length of a rail cut. I explained to him the embarrassing difficulties of opening such a cut, and he very wisely took my word for it, without trying to test the matter experimentally. He also wanted to