Casey at the Bat
Lars Porsena of Clusium
By the Nine Gods he swore
That the great house of Tarquin
Should suffer wrong no more.
By the Nine Gods he swore it,
And named a trysting-day,
And bade his messengers ride forth,
East and west and south and north,
To summon his array.
There is still a third aspirant. A man with the extraordinary name of D'Vys—George Whitefield D'Vys—of Cambridge, Mass., has been a persistent and undiscouraged claimant for many years; he has related the circumstances of the composition of the poem repeatedly and at great length; he has even, at the instance of the late Dr. Harry Thurston Peck, who discussed the question of authorship in the Scrap Book for December, 1908, gone before a notary public and sworn that his story was true. This story, much condensed from D'Vys's diffuse narrative, but with all its essential details, is as follows:
On the first or second Sunday of August, 1886, D'Vys and a friend named Edward L. Cleveland were loitering about the ball grounds at Franklin Park, Boston, when a sudden inspiration seized D'Vys, and he started to write "Casey" on the margin of a Boston Globe he found flying across the field. "I was fairly wild as I mapped it out," he says, "and when I
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