"Comrade, I trust you, and understand. Keep my secret!" And so he died.
Smith was buried -- up soared his sales; lured you his books in every store;
 Exquisite, whimsy, heart-wrung tales; men devoured them and craved for more.
 So when it slyly got about Brown had a posthumous manuscript,
 Jones, the publisher, sought him out, into his pocket deep he dipped.
 "A thousand dollars?" Brown shook his head.
 "The story is not for sale," he said.
 Jones went away, then others came. Tempted and taunted, Brown was true.
 Guarded at friendship's shrine the fame
 of the unpublished story grew and grew.
 It's a long, long lane that has no end,
 but some lanes end in the Potter's field;
 Smith to Brown had been more than friend: patron, protector, spur and shield.
 Poor, loving-wistful, dreamy Brown, long and lean, with a smile askew,
 Friendless he wandered up and down, gaunt as a wolf, as hungry too.
 Brown with his lilt of saucy rhyme, Brown with his tilt of tender mirth
 Garretless in the gloom and grime, singing his glad, mad songs of earth:
 So at last with a faith divine, down and down to the Hunger-line.
There as he stood in a woeful plight,
 tears a-freeze on his sharp cheek-bones,
 Who should chance to behold his plight,
 but the publisher, the plethoric Jones;
 Peered at him for a little while, held out a bill: "_NOW_, will you sell?"
 Brown scanned it with his twisted smile:
 "A thousand dollars! you go to hell!"
Brown enrolled in the homeless host, sleeping anywhere, anywhen;
 Suffered, strove, became a ghost, slave of the lamp for other men;
 For What's-his-name and So-and-so in the abyss his soul he stripped,
 Yet in his want, his worst of woe, held he fast to the manuscript.
 Then one day as he chewed his pen, half in hunger and half despair,
 Creaked the door of his garret den; Dick, his brother, was standing there.
 Down on the pallet bed he sank, ashen his face, his voice a wail:
 "Save me, brother! I've robbed the bank; to-morrow it's ruin, capture, gaol.
 Yet there's a chance: I could to-day pay back the money, save our name;
 You have a manuscript, they say,
 worth a thousand -- think, man! the shame. . . ."
Brown with his heart pain-pierced the while,
 with his stern, starved face, and his lips stone-pale,
 Shuddered and smiled his twisted smile: "Brother, I guess you go to gaol."
While poor Brown in the leer of dawn wrestled with God for the sacred fire,

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