It is a desolate country, charred pines sticking up straight from white sand.  It might be made beautiful if for every tree that they tapped for turpentine they would plant a new one.

But they don’t know enough to make things beautiful.  The Moses of this community will be some man who shall find new methods of farming, new crops for this soil, who will show the people how to live.

And now I come to a strange fairy-tale sort of experience—­an experience with the children who have lived always among these charred pines.

All that evening as I talked, their eyes were upon me, like the eyes of little wild creatures of the wood—­a blank gaze which seemed to question.  The next day when I walked, they went with me, and for some distance I carried the baby, to rest the arms of the big girl, who is always burdened.

It was in the afternoon that we drifted to a little grove of young pines, the one bit of pure green against the white and gray and black of that landscape.  The sky was of sapphire, with a buzzard or two blotted against the blue.

Here with a circle of the trees surrounding us, the children sat down with me.  They were not a talkative group, and I was overcome by a sense of the impossibility of meeting them on any common ground of conversation.  But they seemed to expect something—­they were like a flock of little hungry birds waiting to be fed—­and what do you think I gave them?  Guess.  But I know you have it wrong.

I recited “Flos Mercatorum,” my Whittington poem!

It was done on an impulse, to find if there was anything in them which would respond to such rhyme and rapture of words.

I gave it in my best manner, standing in the center of the circle.  I did not expect applause.  But I got more than applause.  I am not going to try to describe the look that came into the eyes of the oldest boy—­the nearest that I can come to it is to say that it was the look of a child waked from a deep sleep, and gazing wide-eyed upon a new world.

He came straight toward me.  “Where—­did you—­git—­them words?” he asked in a breathless sort of way.

“A man wrote them—­a man named Noyes.”

“Are they true?”

“Yes.”

“Say them again.”

It was not a request.  It was a command.  And I did say them, and saw a soul’s awakening.

Oh, there are people who won’t believe that it can be done like that—­in a moment.  But that boy was ready.  He had dreamed and until now no one had ever put the dreams into words for him.  He cannot read, has probably never heard a fairy tale—­the lore of this region is gruesome and ghostly, rather than lovely and poetic.

Perhaps, ’way back, five, six generations, some ancestor of this lad may have drifted into London town, perhaps the bells sang to him, and subconsciously this sand-hill child was illumined by that inherited memory.  Somewhere in the back of his mind bells have been chiming, and he has not known enough to call them bells.  However that may be, my verses revealed to him a new heaven and a new earth.