“Oh! the Spring! the Spring!” he cried, as in scorn of his sallies they exchanged their unmeaning remarks on the sweet weather across him.  “You seem both to be uncommonly excited by the operations of turtles, rooks, and daws.  Why can’t you let them alone?”

’Wind bloweth,
Cock croweth,
Doodle-doo;
Hippy verteth,
Ricky sterteth,
Sing Cuckoo!’

There’s an old native pastoral!—­Why don’t you write a Spring sonnet, Ricky?  The asparagus-beds are full of promise, I hear, and eke the strawberry.  Berries I fancy your Pegasus has a taste for.  What kind of berry was that I saw some verses of yours about once?—­amatory verses to some kind of berry—­yewberry, blueberry, glueberry!  Pretty verses, decidedly warm.  Lips, eyes, bosom, legs—­legs?  I don’t think you gave her any legs.  No legs and no nose.  That appears to be the poetic taste of the day.  It shall be admitted that you create the very beauties for a chaste people.

     ‘O might I lie where leans her lute!’

and offend no moral community.  That’s not a bad image of yours, my dear boy: 

       ’Her shape is like an antelope
        Upon the Eastern hills.’

But as a candid critic, I would ask you if the likeness can be considered correct when you give her no legs?  You will see at the ballet that you are in error about women at present, Richard.  That admirable institution which our venerable elders have imported from Gallia for the instruction of our gaping youth, will edify and astonish you.  I assure you I used, from reading The Pilgrim’s Scrip, to imagine all sorts of things about them, till I was taken there, and learnt that they are very like us after all, and then they ceased to trouble me.  Mystery is the great danger to youth, my son!  Mystery is woman’s redoubtable weapon, O Richard of the Ordeal!  I’m aware that you’ve had your lessons in anatomy, but nothing will persuade you that an anatomical figure means flesh and blood.  You can’t realize the fact.  Do you intend to publish when you’re in town?  It’ll be better not to put your name.  Having one’s name to a volume of poems is as bad as to an advertising pill.”

“I will send you an early copy, Adrian, when I publish,” quoth Richard.  “Hark at that old blackbird, uncle.”

“Yes!” Hippias quavered; looking up from the usual subject of his contemplation, and trying to take an interest in him, “fine old fellow!”

“What a chuckle he gives out before he flies!  Not unlike July nightingales.  You know that bird I told you of—­the blackbird that had its mate shot, and used to come to sing to old Dame Bakewell’s bird from the tree opposite.  A rascal knocked it over the day before yesterday, and the dame says her bird hasn’t sung a note since.”

“Extraordinary!” Hippias muttered abstractedly.  “I remember the verses.”

“But where’s your moral?” interposed the wrathful Adrian.  “Where’s constancy rewarded?