Hippias blinked, exclaiming, “Really, my dear boy!  I never saw you so excited.”

“It’s the railway!  It’s the fun, uncle!”

“Ah!” Hippias wagged a melancholy head, “you’ve got the Golden Bride!  Keep her if you can.  That’s a pretty fable of your father’s.  I gave him the idea, though.  Austin filches a great many of my ideas!”

“Here’s the idea in verse, uncle: 

       ’O sunless walkers by the tide! 
        O have you seen the Golden Bride! 
        They say that she is fair beyond
        All women; faithful, and more fond!

“You know, the young inquirer comes to a group of penitent sinners by the brink of a stream.  They howl, and answer: 

        Faithful she is, but she forsakes: 
        And fond, yet endless woe she makes: 
        And fair! but with this curse she’s cross’d;
        To know her not till she is lost!’

“Then the doleful party march off in single file solemnly, and the fabulist pursues: 

       ’She hath a palace in the West: 
        Bright Hesper lights her to her rest: 
        And him the Morning Star awakes
        Whom to her charmed arms she takes.

        So lives he till he sees, alas! 
        The maids of baser metal pass.’

“And prodigal of the happiness she lends him, he asks to share it with one of them.  There is the Silver Maid, and the Copper, and the Brassy Maid, and others of them.  First, you know, he tries Argentine, and finds her only twenty to the pound, and has a worse experience with Copperina, till he descends to the scullery; and the lower he goes, the less obscure become the features of his Bride of Gold, and all her radiance shines forth, my uncle.”

“Verse rather blunts the point.  Well, keep to her, now you’ve got her,” says Hippias.

“We will, uncle!—­Look how the farms fly past!  Look at the cattle in the fields!  And how the lines duck, and swim up!

     ’She claims the whole, and not the part—­
     The coin of an unused heart! 
     To gain his Golden Bride again,
     He hunts with melancholy men,’

—­and is waked no longer by the Morning Star!”

“Not if he doesn’t sleep till an hour before it rises!” Hippias interjected.  “You don’t rhyme badly.  But stick to prose.  Poetry’s a Base-metal maid.  I’m not sure that any writing’s good for the digestion.  I’m afraid it has spoilt mine.”

“Fear nothing, uncle!” laughed Richard.  “You shall ride in the park with me every day to get an appetite.  You and I and the Golden Bride.  You know that little poem of Sandoe’s?

     ’She rides in the park on a prancing bay,
      She and her squires together;
     Her dark locks gleam from a bonnet of grey,
      And toss with the tossing feather.

     ’Too calmly proud for a glance of pride
      Is the beautiful face as it passes;
     The cockneys nod to each other aside,
      The coxcombs lift their glasses.