With many other bits of prophecy and celestial description I was regaled as I completed my toilet, and I hurried out of doors for an opportunity to think without disturbance.  Strolling past the henyard I saw a meditative turtle, and picking him up and shouting to my nephews I held the reptile up for their inspection.  Their window-blinds flew open, and a unanimous though not exactly harmonious “Oh!” greeted my prize.

“Where did you get it, Uncle Harry?” asked Budge.

“Down by the hen-coop.”

Budge’s eyes opened wide; he seemed to devote a moment to profound thought, and then he exclaimed:—­

“Why, I don’t see how the hens could lay such a big thing—­just put him in your hat till I come down, will you?”

I dropped the turtle in Budge’s wheelbarrow, and made a tour of the flower-borders.  The flowers, always full of suggestion to me, seemed suddenly to have new charms and powers; they actually impelled me to try to make rhymes,—­me, a steady white-goods salesman!  The impulse was too strong to be resisted, though I must admit that the results were pitifully meager:—­

    “As radiant as that matchless rose
      Which poet-artists fancy;
    As fair as whitest lily-blows,
      As modest as the pansy;
    As pure as dew which hides within
      Aurora’s sun-kissed chalice;
    As tender as the primrose sweet—­
      All this, and more, is Alice.”

In inflicting this fragment upon the reader, I have not the faintest idea that he can discover any merit in it; I quote it only that a subsequent experience of mine may be more intelligible.  When I had composed these wretched lines I became conscious that I had neither pencil nor paper wherewith to preserve them.  Should I lose them—­my first self-constructed poem?  Never!  This was not the first time in which I had found it necessary to preserve words by memory alone.  So I repeated my ridiculous lines over and over again, until the eloquent feeling of which they were the graceless expression inspired me to accompany my recital with gestures.  Six—­eight—­ten—­a dozen—­ twenty times I repeated these lines, each time with additional emotion and gestures, when a thin voice, very near me, remarked:—­

“Ocken Hawwy, you does djust as if you was swimmin’.”

Turning, I beheld my nephew Toddie—­how long he had been behind me I had no idea.  He looked earnestly into my eyes and then remarked:—­

“Ocken Hawwy, your faysh is wed, djust like a wosy-posy.”

“Let’s go right in to breakfast, Toddie,” said I aloud, as I grumbled to myself about the faculty of observation which Tom’s children seemed to have.