“I’ve never read about men sending geraniums,” I replied.  “It’s odd, but I never have.  I suppose the can makes them seem a little unwieldly.  Still——­”

“I had thought of forty-graph album.”  Perry spoke timidly again.

I had no mind to let him venture any more suggestions.  His was too fickle a fancy, and I had settled on an easy solution of the problem.  He was to send her a geranium.  Somehow, I knew deep down in my own heart, ill versed as I was in such things, that I should never send her such a gift myself.  I would climb to the top of Gander Knob for a wild rose or rhododendron; I would stir the leaves from the gap to the river in search of a simple spray of arbutus for her.  But step before her with my arms clasping a tin can with a geranium plant r Heaven forbid!  Perry was different.  The suggestion pleased him.  He was rubbing his hands and smiling in great contentment.

“I might send a po-em with it,” he said.  “I’ve allus found that poetry kind of catches ahold of a girl when you are away.  It keeps you in her mind.  It must be sing-song, though, kind of gettin’ into her head like quinine.  It must keep time with the splashin’ of the churn and the howlin’ of the wind.  I mind when I was keepin’ company with Rhoda Spiker—­she afterward married Ulysses G. Harmon, of Hopedale—­I sent her a po-em that run somethin’ like this:  ’I live, I love, my Life, my Light; long love I thou, Sweetheart so bright’——­”

Perry’s po-em never got into my brain, for as he repeated the captivating lines, I was gazing over his shoulder, out of the window, down the road to the village.  I saw a girl on the store porch, standing by the door a moment as if undecided which way to go.  Then she turned her head into the November gale and came rapidly up the road.  In a minute more she would be passing the school-house door.  Tim’s letter was in my pocket and the sun was still high over the gable of the mill.

[Illustration:  I saw a girl on the store porch.]

“Rhoda sent me a postal asking me to write her a po-em full of Ks or Xs or Ws, just so as she could get the Ls out of her head, and——­”

“Perry!” I broke right into his story and seized the lapel of his waistcoat as though he were my dearest friend.  “My girl is going by the school-house door this very minute.  Now you help me.  Take the school for the rest of the afternoon.”

“Your girl?” cried Perry.  His voice broke from the smothered conference tone and the school heard it and tittered.  He recovered himself and poked me in the chest.

“Oh!” he said, “Widow Spoonholler—­I seen you last Sunday singin’ often the same book—­I seen you.  Hurry, Mark, hurry; and luck to you!  You’ve done me most a mighty good turn.”

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