And if mail-time is fun usually, it is great when all the news is about you and your friends all swarm around you with interest. Everybody had heard about Peter and his play, though neither Edith nor Tolly thought they had told, and that he was soon coming down to visit me, and, of course, that meant to visit all of Hayesboro. Miss Henrietta Spain, who teaches literature from spelling to the English poets, in the Hayesboro Academy, had read Peter's new poem--the one the Literary Opinion had copied last month--and she was pink with excitement over the prospect of having such a genius in our midst, "Look out that you don't get put in the play on the other side of the footlights, Hayes," said the mayor, slapping daddy on the back. "Be careful how you have a poet sitting around your house."
"The South has long waited to have a genius come down and write a fitting epic about her Homeric drama of Civil War, Elizabeth," said old Colonel Menefee. "Let your young friend come, and I can give him material, beginning with that Bedford Forest charge just before Chickamauga that--"
"And just remember," interrupted Mrs. Winston Polk, "how Elizabeth's mother, Betty's own Grandmother Nelson, rode fifty miles and back in twenty-four hours to get Morgan to send wagons for her barnful of corn to feed his soldiers, though she and her negroes were dependent on what she could grow between then and frost. She never faltered, but--"
"The Nashville and Louisville papers all wrote up the way Clyde Tolbot swam Salt River and stopped the L. & N. express from going down in the cut during the storm last year," Edith hastened to say when Mrs. Folk's breath had given out. Tolly's ugly good face was beautiful to see when she spoke of him thus, though Edith didn't notice it.
When you start a Harpeth Valley town to telling how wonderful it is to the third and fourth generation back, it is like a seething torrent and can go on for ever. I glowed to think of all the wonderful things I could write Peter, and we all started home from the post-office as late as supper hour would admit.
After I got home, escorted by the reunited Edith and Tolly, as well as by Billy Robertson, who wants to be Peter's hero, though he wasn't directly saying so, I sat down determinedly to write to Peter at inspiring length and make him feel how I valued his confidence in me, also to mention the war drama. Just then I raised my eyes and that wonderful notebook had pushed a corner of itself out of the desk from under the manuscript. I couldn't use my mind advising between a modern epic and a war drama while it was plowed up ready for peonies, so I decided to wait and ask Sam's advice about advising Peter, and I read the rest of the peony pages in comfort. Right then, too, I made up my mind that I was going to get ground bone to plant at the roots of all the peonies if I had to use my own skeleton to do it and would only see them bloom with astral eyes.