And suddenly he said: "Sandusky!"

And suddenly he said: “Sandusky!”
Now what was he talking of there in his musky,
Worm-eaten rooms of the rue de la Paix ?
—Of his youth of jack rabbits and peanuts and snakes
When all was silent about the Lakes.
Now what is the name of them? Lake Ladoga?
No, no, that's in Russia. It's Ticonderoga,
Ontario, Champlin, each with their woods,
And never a house for miles and miles
And the boys in their boats floated on by the piles
Of old wigwams where shreds of blankets dangled.
And they caught their jack rabbits, lit bonfires and angled
In shallows for catfish. That's it, in Sandusky!
The Bay of Sandusky.

And then I remembered with grey, clear precision,
And I saw—yes I saw—looking over the way
Two Chinese chiropodists, villainous fellows,
With faces of sulphur—and lemon—yellows,
Gaze with that gaze that's half fanatic,
Part atrocious and partly sweet,
Each from a window of his own attic
At a mannequin on my side of the street,
And each grinned and girned in his Manchester blue,
And smirked with his eyes and his pig-tail too.
And somehow they made me feel sick; but I lost them
At the word “Sandusky.” A landscape crossed them;
A scene no more nor less than a vision,
All clear and grey in the rue de la Paix.

It must have been seven years ago,
I was out on a river whose name I've forgotten;
The Hudson perhaps or the Kotohotten.
It doesn't much matter. Do you know the Hudson?
A sort of a Moselle with New York duds on,
There are crags and castles, a distance all grey,
Rocks, forests and elbows. But castles of Jay
And William H. Post and Mrs Poughkeepsie—
Imagine a Moselle that's thoroughly tipsy,
A nightmare of ninety American castles
With English servants trained up like vassals,
Of Hiram P. Ouese who's a fortune from pills for the liver.

Anyhow, I've forgotten the name of the river.

And the steamer steamed upwards between the hills
And passed through the rapids they called the Narrows
'Twixt the high grey banks where the firs grow jagged,
And the castles ceased and the forest grew ragged,
And the steamer belched forth sparks and stayed
At a wooden village, then grunted and swayed
Out to midstream and round a reach
Where the river widened and swirled about,
And we slowed in the current where black snags stuck out,
And suddenly we saw a beach—

A grey old beach and some old grey mounds
That seemed to silence the steamer's sounds;
So still and old and grey and ragged.
For there they lay, the tumuli, barrows,
The Indian graves. . . .
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