102 WITH EARTH AND SKY 
apple-bloom breath had made it tipsy. It sat 
akimbo on the poet’s head, as if born out under 
the trees, in a wind-blown fashion like a wind- 
turned leaf. The hat had a weather-beaten, sun- 
burnt look as if it could have voted and sat like 
a small boy on a gate post when a circus invades 
the town. 
The orchardist wore shoes. That was a tribute 
to civilization. He should have worn sandals 
or, which was better, should have gone bare- 
foot. Unquestionably, barefootedness is the right 
footgear for a farmer; and besides, it minds us 
of how among Maeterlinck’s happinesses in ‘The 
Blue-Bird”’ there troops “the happiness of going 
barefoot in the dew.” I feel the grass tickling 
my legs right now! So, I met the master of 
these florescent revels, this farmer-Prospero who 
has covered up all this orchard and runnel bank 
and comb and long reach with a white foam of 
an ocean far-spreading to the sky, an ocean of 
precious apple-bloom. Howbeit, not as at the 
wave of good man Shakespeare’s bearded Pros- 
pero, but at the dig of this Prospero’s spade and 
hoe has this ocean been turned into a turbulence 
of storm so that the green waves are all one wild 
wallow of foam, white to the eyes as sea gull’s 
wings. The old Greeks yclept the poet ‘Poietes,” 
a maker. Wherefore by my halidome (from 
Captain Dalgetty and others whose names slip 
me now) and in good sooth, this friend of my 
recent making is squarely and irrefutably a poet, 
