Of course Edward was delighted, and Longfellow gave him the sheet on which he had written: 

Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart, for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait. 
HENRY W. LONGFELLOW.

Then, as the fine head bent down to copy the lines once more, Edward ventured to say to him;

“I should think it would keep you busy if you did this for every one who asked you.”

“Well,” said the poet, “you see, I am not so busy a man as I was some years ago, and I shouldn’t like to disappoint a little girl, should you?”

As he took up his letters again, he discovered five more requests for his autograph.  At each one he reached into a drawer in his desk, took a card, and wrote his name on it.

“There are a good many of these every day,” said Longfellow, “but I always like to do this little favor.  It is so little to do, to write your name on a card; and if I didn’t do it some boy or girl might be looking, day by day, for the postman and be disappointed.  I only wish I could write my name better for them.  You see how I break my letters?  That’s because I never took pains with my writing when I was a boy.  I don’t think I should get a high mark for penmanship if I were at school, do you?”

“I see you get letters from Europe,” said the boy, as Longfellow opened an envelope with a foreign stamp on it.

“Yes, from all over the world,” said the poet.  Then, looking at the boy quickly, he said:  “Do you collect postage-stamps?”

Edward said he did.

“Well, I have some right here, then;” and going to a drawer in a desk he took out a bundle of letters, and cut out the postage-stamps and gave them to the boy.

“There’s one from the Netherlands.  There’s where I was born,” Edward ventured to say.

“In the Netherlands?  Then you are a real Dutchman.  Well!  Well!” he said, laying down his pen.  “Can you read Dutch?”

The boy said he could.

“Then,” said the poet, “you are just the boy I am looking for.”  And going to a bookcase behind him he brought out a book, and handing it to the boy, he said, his eyes laughing:  “Can you read that?”

“Yes, indeed,” said Edward.  “These are your poems in Dutch.”

“That’s right,” he said.  “Now, this is delightful.  I am so glad you came.  I received this book last week, and although I have been in the Netherlands, I cannot speak or read Dutch.  I wonder whether you would read a poem to me and let me hear how it sounds.”

So Edward took “The Old Clock on the Stairs,” and read it to him.

The poet’s face beamed with delight.  “That’s beautiful,” he said, and then quickly added:  “I mean the language, not the poem.”

“Now,” he went on, “I’ll tell you what we’ll do:  we’ll strike a bargain.  We Yankees are great for bargains, you know.  If you will read me ‘The Village Blacksmith’ you can sit in that chair there made out of the wood of the old spreading chestnut-tree, and I’ll take you out and show you where the old shop stood.  Is that a bargain?”