“That’s true,” said Cassius.  “I never thought of that.  If a dozen poets got to work on those slates at once, a fife corps wouldn’t be a circumstance to them.”

“Well, it all goes to prove what I have thought all along,” said Doctor Johnson.  “Homer’s idea is a good one, and Samson was wise in backing it up.  The poets need to be concentrated somewhere where they will not be a nuisance to other people, and where other people will not be a nuisance to them.  Homer ought to have a place to compose in where the vingt-et-un players will not interrupt his frenzies, and, on the other hand, the vingt-et-un and other players should be protected from the wooers of the muse.  I’ll vote to have the Poets’ Corner, and in it I move that Cassius’s slate idea be carried out.  It will be a great saving, and if the corner we select be far enough away from the other corners of the club, the squeaking of the slate-pencils need bother no one.”

“I agree to that,” said Blackstone.  “Only I think it should be understood that, in granting the petition of the poets, we do not bind ourselves to yield to doctors and lawyers and shoemakers and plumbers in case they should each want a corner to themselves.”

“A very wise idea,” said Sir Walter.  Whereupon the resolution was suitably worded, and passed unanimously.

Just where the Poets’ Corner is to be located the members of the committee have not as yet decided, although Confucius is strongly in favor of having it placed in a dingy situated a quarter of a mile astern of the house-boat, and connected therewith by a slight cord, which can be easily cut in case the squeaking of the poets’ slate-pencils becomes too much for the nervous system of the members who have no corner of their own.

CHAPTER VI:  SOME THEORIES, DARWINIAN AND OTHERWISE

“I observe,” said Doctor Darwin, looking up from a perusal of an asbestos copy of the London Times—­“I observe that an American professor has discovered that monkeys talk.  I consider that a very interesting fact.”

“It undoubtedly is,” observed Doctor Livingstone, “though hardly new.  I never said anything about it over in the other world, but I discovered years ago in Africa that monkeys were quite as well able to hold a sustained conversation with each other as most men are.”

“And I, too,” put in Baron Munchausen, “have frequently conversed with monkeys.  I made myself a master of their idioms during my brief sojourn in—­ah—­in—­well, never mind where.  I never could remember the names of places.  The interesting point is that at one period of my life I was a master of the monkey language.  I have even gone so far as to write a sonnet in Simian, which was quite as intelligible to the uneducated as nine-tenths of the sonnets written in English or American.”

“Do you mean to say that you could acquire the monkey accent?” asked Doctor Darwin, immediately interested.