A BAREFOOT BOY A barefoot boy! I mark him at his play For May is here once more, and so is he, His dusty trousers, rolled half to the knee, And his bare ankles grimy, too, as they Cross-hatchings of the nettle, in array Of feverish stripes, hint vividly to me Of woody pathways winding endlessly Along the creek, where even yesterday He plunged his shrinking body -- gasped and shook -- Yet called the water "warm," with never lack Of joy. And so, half enviously I look upon this graceless barefoot and his track,. His toe stubbed -- ay, his big toe- nail knocked back Like unto the clasp of an old pocketbook. -- James Whitcomb Riley won fame as the "Hoosier Poet" He wrote much verse in pure English, but his most popular works are in the dialect of his home state, IN. The son of a lawyer, he left school after grammar school and worked as a sign painter and later as an actor in a medicine show. In his spare time he composed songs and revised plays. Returning to Greenfield, he worked on the local paper, then on the "Anderson (IN) Democrat." In 1877 he joined the "Indianapolis Journal." He began to contribute poems to several papers under an assumed name. His verses made him famous and he traveled about the country lecturing and reading his poems. Riley's remote genealogy is apparently in dispute - reaching back to Cork, Ireland or, perhaps, to an English Ryland family..