Page:Captain Craig; a book of poems.djvu/30

Your philhellenic proletariat—
He! he!"—"But what the devil is it all
About?" said I. "What has he done? What ails him?"—
"What has he done? Ye gods! What has he done?
Man, he's a tramp—a Waggles—a dead beat!
I have a friend who knew him fifteen years
Ago, and I have his assurance now
That your sequestered parasite achieved
The same discreet collapse, at intervals,
Then as when first you found him. And you ask
What he has done! Go find a looking-glass
And you may see some recent work of his—
The most remunerative, and I think
The most unconscious."
With another man
I might have made of that last adjective
A stimulating text; but Killigrew
Was not the one for me to stimulate
In five defective minutes, and I knew it.
So I offer no defense for keeping still
While he gave birth to phrases for my sake,
Nor more for staring at the changeless curve
Where river and railroad vanished, half a mile
Beyond us to the north. I gave him leave
To talk as long as he had words in him,