That Boy.—–­You bet!  Give me a stick and see if I don’t.

And can you tell me why you like candy?

That Boy.—­Because I do.

—­There, now, that is the whole matter in a nutshell.  Why do your teeth like crackling crust, and your organs of taste like spongy crumb, and your digestive contrivances take kindly to bread rather than toadstools—­

That Boy (thinking he was still being catechised).—­Because they do.

Whereupon the Landlady said, Sh! and the Young Girl laughed, and the Lady smiled; and Dr. Ben Franklin kicked him, moderately, under the table, and the Astronomer looked up at the ceiling to see what had happened, and the Member of the Haouse cried, Order!  Order! and the Salesman said, Shut up, cash-boy! and the rest of the boarders kept on feeding; except the Master, who looked very hard but half approvingly at the small intruder, who had come about as nearly right as most professors would have done.

—­You poets,—­the Master said after this excitement had calmed down, —­you poets have one thing about you that is odd.  You talk about everything as if you knew more about it than the people whose business it is to know all about it.  I suppose you do a little of what we teachers used to call “cramming” now and then?

—­If you like your breakfast you must n’t ask the cook too many questions,—­I answered.

—­Oh, come now, don’t be afraid of letting out your secrets.  I have a notion I can tell a poet that gets himself up just as I can tell a make-believe old man on the stage by the line where the gray skullcap joins the smooth forehead of the young fellow of seventy.  You’ll confess to a rhyming dictionary anyhow, won’t you?

—­I would as lief use that as any other dictionary, but I don’t want it.  When a word comes up fit to end a line with I can feel all the rhymes in the language that are fit to go with it without naming them.  I have tried them all so many times, I know all the polygamous words and all the monogamous ones, and all the unmarrying ones,—­the whole lot that have no mates,—­as soon as I hear their names called.  Sometimes I run over a string of rhymes, but generally speaking it is strange what a short list it is of those that are good for anything.  That is the pitiful side of all rhymed verse.  Take two such words as home and world.  What can you do with chrome or loam or gnome or tome?  You have dome, foam, and roam, and not much more to use in your pome, as some of our fellow-countrymen call it.  As for world, you know that in all human probability somebody or something will be hurled into it or out of it; its clouds may be furled or its grass impearled; possibly something may be whirled, or curled, or have swirled, one of Leigh Hunt’s words, which with lush, one of Keats’s, is an important part of the stock in trade of some dealers in rhyme.

—­And how much do you versifiers know of all those arts and sciences you refer to as if you were as familiar with them as a cobbler is with his wax and lapstone?