When she sometimes went to sleep in her chair during the Sunday afternoon
readings he poked her with his cane and laughingly told her to wake up and
listen to the dream of a great dreamer. Among Browning's verses his
favourites were "A Light Woman" and "Fra Lippo Lippi," and he would recite
these aloud with great gusto. He declared Mark Twain the greatest man in
the world and in certain moods he would walk the road beside Sam reciting
over and over one or two lines of verse, often this from Poe:
Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like some Nicean bark of yore.
Then, stopping and turning upon the boy, he would demand whether or not
the writing of such lines wasn't worth living a life for.
Telfer had a pack of dogs that always went with them on their walks at
night and he had for them long Latin names that Sam could never remember.
One summer be bought a trotting mare from Lem McCarthy and gave great
attention to the colt, which he named Bellamy Boy, trotting him up and
down a little driveway by the side of his house for hours at a time and
declaring he would be a great trotting horse. He could recite the colt's
pedigree with great gusto and when he had been talking to Sam of some book
he would repay the boy's attention by saying, "You, my boy, are as far
superior to the run of boys about town as the colt, Bellamy Boy, is
superior to the farm horses that are hitched along Main Street on Saturday
afternoons.
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