id Raleigh. "Otherwise
Queen Elizabeth, to whom I am indebted for the suggestion, would be
excluded. She never married, you know."

"Didn't she?" said Confucius. "No, I didn't know it; but that doesn't
prove anything. When I went to school we didn't study the history of the
Elizabethan period. She didn't have absolute sway over England, then?"

"She had; but what of that?" queried Raleigh.

"Do you mean to say that she lived and died an old maid from choice?"
demanded Confucius.

"Certainly I do," said Raleigh. "And why should I not tell you that?"

"For a very good and sufficient reason," retorted Confucius, "which is,
in brief, that I am not a marine. I may dislike women, my dear Raleigh,
but I know them better than you do, gallant as you are; and when you tell
me in one and the same moment that a woman holding absolute sway over men
yet lived and died an old maid, you must not be indignant if I smile and
bite the end of my thumb, which is the Chinese way of saying that's all
in your eye, Betty Martin."

"Believe it or not, you poor old back number," retorted Raleigh, hotly.
"It alters nothing. Queen Elizabeth could have married a hundred times
over if she had wished. I know I lost my head there completely."

"That shows, Sir Walter," said Dryden, with a grin, "how wrong you are.
You lost your head to King James. Hi! Shakespeare, here's a man doesn't
know who chopped his head off."

Raleigh's face flushed scarlet. "'Tis better to have had a head and lost
it," he cried, "than never to have had a head at all! Mark you, Dryden,
my boy, it ill befits you to scoff at me for my misfortune, for dust thou
art, and to dust thou hast returned, if word from t'other side about thy
books and that which in and on them lies be true."

"Whate'er be said about my books," said Dryden, angrily, "be they read or
be they not, 'tis mine they are, and none there be who dare dispute their
authorship."

"Thus proving that men, thank Heaven, are still sane," ejaculated Doctor
Johnson. "To assume the authorship of Dryden would be not so much a
claim, my friend, as a confession."

"Shades of the mighty Chow!" cried Confucius. "An' will ye hear the
poets squabble! Egad! A ladies' day could hardly introduce into our
midst a more diverting disputation."

"We're all getting a little high-flown in our phraseology," put in
Shakespeare at this point. "Let's quit talking in blank-verse and come
down to business. _I_ thin