He tells about his walks and the people he met in a little book,
"Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty".
For the conditions of his tramps were that he should keep away
from cities, money, baggage, and pay his way by reciting his own poems.
And he did it. People liked his pieces, and tramp farmhands
with rough necks and rougher hands left off singing smutty limericks
and took to "Atalanta in Calydon" apparently because they preferred it.
Of motor cars, which gave him a lift, he says: "I still maintain
that the auto is a carnal institution, to be shunned by the truly spiritual,
but there are times when I, for one, get tired of being spiritual."
His story of the "Five Little Children Eating Mush" (that was one night
in Colorado, and he recited to them while they ate supper) has more beauty
and tenderness and jolly tears than all the expensive sob stuff
theatrical managers ever dreamed of. Mr. Lindsay doesn't need to write verse
to be a poet. His prose is poetry -- poetry straight from the soil,
of America that is, and of a nobler America that is to be.
You cannot afford -- both for your entertainment and for the REAL IDEA
that this young man has (of which we have said nothing) -- to miss this book.
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