e had written a quatrain that he
proposed to read to us _au clair de la lune_. The lines were
addressed: "To My Own Blackbird."

"She's a pernounced brunette," explained the poet; "and her name is
Birdie. I thought some of entitlin' the pome: 'To a Mocking Bird'; but
I surmised that would sound too pussonal. She has mocked me, an'
others, more'n once."

He sighed, still smarting at the memory of a gibe; then he recited the
following in an effective monotone:--

"Oh! scorn not the humble worm, proud bird,
As you sing i' the top o' the tree;
Though doomed to squirm i' the ground, unheard.
He'll make a square meal for thee."

"It ain't Shakespeare," murmured the bard, "but the idee is O.K."

My brother commended the lines as lacking neither rhyme nor reason,
but he questioned the propriety of alluding to a lady's appetite, and
protested strongly against the use of that abject word--worm. He told
Jasperson that in comparing himself to a reptile he was slapping the
cheeks of his progenitors.

"But I do feel like a worm when Miss Birdie's around," objected the
man of acres. "It may be ondignified, but that there eye of hers does
make me wiggle."

"It's a thousand pities," said I softly, "that Miss Dutton has only
one eye."

Jasperson wouldn't agree with me. He replied, with ardour, that he
would never have dared to raise his two blue orbs to Miss Dutton's
brilliant black one, unless he had been conscious that his mistress,
like himself, had suffered mutilation.

"I'm two fingers short," he concluded, "an' she's lackin' an eye.
That, gen'lemen, makes it a stand-off. Say, shall I send her this yere
pome?"

"Most certainly not," said Ajax.

"Then for the Lord's sake, post me."

I touched Ajax with my foot, and coughed discreetly; for I knew my
brother's weakness. He is a spendthrift in the matter of giving
advice. If Jasperson had appealed to me, the elder and more
experienced, I should have begged politely, but emphatically, to be
excused from interference. I hold that a man and a maid must settle
their love affairs without help from a third party. Ajax, unhappily,
thinks otherwise.

"Miss Dutton," he began, tentatively, "is aware, Jasperson, of your--
er--passion for her?"

"She ain't no sech a thing," said the lover.

"Yet her eye," continued Ajax, "is keen--keen and penetrating."

"It's a peach," cried the enthusiastic poet. "There ain't another like
it in the land,