Presently I expressed surprise that Jasperson had the honour of Miss Dutton’s unofficial acquaintance.

“I was interdooced last fall,” said our friend, “at a candy-pullin’ up to Mis’ Swiggart’s.  Not that Miss Birdie was a-pullin’ candy.  No, sir; she ain’t built that a way, but she was settin’ there kind of scornful, but smilin’ An’ later she an’ me sung some hymns together.  Mebbe, gen’lemen, ye’ve heard Miss Birdie sing?”

I shook my head regretfully, but Ajax spoke enthusiastically of the lady’s powers as a vocalist.  He had previously described her voice to me as “a full choke, warranted to kill stone-dead at sixty yards.”

“It is a lovely voice,” sighed Jasperson, “strong, an’ full, an’ rich.  Why, there ain’t an organ in the county can down her high B!” Then, warmed by my brother’s sympathy, he fumbled in his pocket, and found a sheet of note-paper.  Upon this he had written a quatrain that he proposed to read to us au clair de la lune.  The lines were addressed:  “To My Own Blackbird.”

“She’s a pernounced brunette,” explained the poet; “and her name is Birdie.  I thought some of entitlin’ the pome:  ‘To a Mocking Bird’; but I surmised that would sound too pussonal.  She has mocked me, an’ others, more’n once.”

He sighed, still smarting at the memory of a gibe; then he recited the following in an effective monotone:—­

“Oh! scorn not the humble worm, proud bird,
As you sing i’ the top o’ the tree;
Though doomed to squirm i’ the ground, unheard. 
He’ll make a square meal for thee.”

“It ain’t Shakespeare,” murmured the bard, “but the idee is O.K.”

My brother commended the lines as lacking neither rhyme nor reason, but he questioned the propriety of alluding to a lady’s appetite, and protested strongly against the use of that abject word—­worm.  He told Jasperson that in comparing himself to a reptile he was slapping the cheeks of his progenitors.

“But I do feel like a worm when Miss Birdie’s around,” objected the man of acres.  “It may be ondignified, but that there eye of hers does make me wiggle.”

“It’s a thousand pities,” said I softly, “that Miss Dutton has only one eye.”

Jasperson wouldn’t agree with me.  He replied, with ardour, that he would never have dared to raise his two blue orbs to Miss Dutton’s brilliant black one, unless he had been conscious that his mistress, like himself, had suffered mutilation.

“I’m two fingers short,” he concluded, “an’ she’s lackin’ an eye.  That, gen’lemen, makes it a stand-off.  Say, shall I send her this yere pome?”

“Most certainly not,” said Ajax.

“Then for the Lord’s sake, post me.”

I touched Ajax with my foot, and coughed discreetly; for I knew my brother’s weakness.  He is a spendthrift in the matter of giving advice.  If Jasperson had appealed to me, the elder and more experienced, I should have begged politely, but emphatically, to be excused from interference.  I hold that a man and a maid must settle their love affairs without help from a third party.  Ajax, unhappily, thinks otherwise.