on. He had invented a method of his own, which I
shall not divulge, for snaring these birds; and whenever he caught them
he promptly wrung their necks. For the same reason he would have been
not unwilling to wring the necks of Lady Lottie Passingham and of the
Literary Counterpart had they continued to pester him.

Here then were the conditions from which we drew the materials for our
conspiracy. Mrs. Abel, though at first reluctant, consented at last to
play the active part in a new piece of experimental Snarleychology. It
was determined that we would try our subject with poetry, and also that
we would try him with "something big." For a long time we discussed what
this something "big" was to be. Choice nearly fell on "A Grammarian's
Funeral," but I am glad this was not adopted; for, though it represented
very well our own views of Snarley Bob, I doubt if it would have
appealed directly to the subject himself. At length one of us suggested
Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale," to which the other immediately replied,
"Why didn't we think of that before?" It was the very thing.

But how were we to proceed? We knew very well that a deliberately
planned attempt to "read something" to Snarley was sure to fail. He
would suspect that we were "interested in him" in the way he always
resented, or that we wanted to improve his mind, which was also a thing
he could not bear. Still, we might practice a little artful deception.
We might meet him together by accident in the quarry, as we had done
before; and Mrs. Abel, after due preliminaries and a little leading-on
about nightingales, might produce the volume from her pocket and read
the poem. So it was arranged. But I think we parted that night with a
feeling that we were going to do something ridiculous, and Mr. Abel told
me quite frankly that we were a pair of precious fools.

One lovely morning about the middle of April the desired meeting in the
quarry was duly brought off. The lambing season was almost over, and
Snarley was occupied in looking after a few belated ewes. We arrived, of
course, separately; but there must have been something in our manner
which put Snarley on his guard. He looked at us in turn with glances
which plainly told that he suspected a planned attack on the isolation
of his soul. Presently he lapsed into his most disagreeable manner, and
his horse-like face began to wear a singularly brutal expression. It was
one of his bad days; for some time he had evidently