I have tried to back-track Paul Laurence Dunbar, now and then, and have found it good fun.  Once I started with his expression, “the whole sky overhead and the whole earth underneath,” and tried to get back to where that started.  He must have been lying on his back on some grass-plot, right in the centre of everything, with that whole half-sphere of sky luring his spirit out toward the infinite, with a pillow that was eight thousand miles thick.  If I had been his teacher I might have called him lazy and shiftless as he lay there, because he was not finding how to place a decimal point, I’m glad, on the whole, that I was not his teacher, for I’d have twinges of conscience every time I read one of his big thoughts.  I’d feel that, while he was lying there growing big, I was doing my best to make him little.  When I was lying on my back there in the Pantheon in Rome, looking up through that wide opening, and watching a moving-picture show that has no rival, the fleecy clouds in their ever-changing forms against that blue background of matchless Italian sky, those gendarmes debated the question of arresting me for disorderly conduct.  My conduct was disorderly because they couldn’t understand it.  But, if Raphael could have risen from his tomb only a few yards away, he would have told those fellows not to disturb me while I was being so liberally educated.  Then, that other time, when my friend Reuben and I stood on the very prow of the ship when the sea was rolling high, swinging us up into the heights, and then down into the depths, with the roar drowning out all possibility of talk—­well, somehow, I thought of that copy-book back yonder with its message that “Knowledge is power.”  And I never think of power without recalling that experience as I watched that battle royal between the power of the sea and the power of the ship that could withstand the angry buffeting of the waves, and laugh in glee as it rode them down.  I know that six times nine are fifty-four, but I confess that I forgot this fact out there on the prow of that ship.  Some folks might say that Reuben and I were wasting our time, but I can’t think so.  I like, even now, to stand out in the clear during a thunder-storm.  I want the head uncovered, too, that the wind may toss my hair about while I look the lightning-flashes straight in the eye and stand erect and unafraid as the thunder crashes and rolls and reverberates about me.  I like to watch the trees swaying to and fro, keeping time to the majestic rhythm of the elements.  To me such an experience is what my neighbor John calls “growing weather,” and at such a time the bigness of the affair causes me to forget for the time that there are such things as double datives.