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 m