oggridge was singing a jaunty stave.

The sound goaded Sam to madness; he ground his teeth and made up his
mind.

"Say 'yes,'" he answered, shortly.

The word was no sooner spoken than he wished it recalled. But the
urchin had taken to his heels. With an angry sigh Sam let
circumstance decide for him, and returned to the reading-room.

No doubt the consciousness that pique had just betrayed his judgment
made him the more inclined to quarrel with the poet. But assuredly
the sight that met his eyes caused his blood to boil; for Mr.
Moggridge was calmly in possession of the chair and newspaper which
Sam had but a moment since resigned.

"Excuse me, but that is my chair and my paper."

"Eh?" The poet looked up sweetly. "Surely, the Club chair and the
Club paper--"

"I have but this moment left them."

"By a singular coincidence, I have but this moment taken possession
of them."

"Give them up, sir."

"I shall do nothing of the kind, sir."

At this point Sam was seized with the unlucky inspiration of quoting
from Mr. Moggridge's published works:

"Forbid the flood to wet thy feet,
Or bind its wrath in chains;
But never seek to quench the heat
That fires a poet's veins!"

This stanza, delivered with nice attention to its author's
drawing-room manner, was too much.

"Sir, you are no gentleman!"

"You seem," retorted Sam, "to be an authority on manners as well as
on Customs. I won't repeat your charge; but I'll be dashed if you're
a poet!"

My Muse is in a very pretty pass. Gentlest of her sisterhood, she
has wandered from the hum of Miss Limpenny's whist-table into the
turmoil of Mars. Even as one who, strolling through a smiling
champaign, finds suddenly a lion in his path, and to him straightway
the topmost bough of the platanus is dearer than the mother that bare
him--in short, I really cannot say how this history would have ended,
had not Fortune at this juncture descended to the Club-room in form
and speech like to Admiral Buzza.

The Admiral did not convey his son away in a hollow cloud, or even
break the Club telescope in Mr. Moggridge's hand; he made a speech
instead, to this effect:

"My sons, attend and cease from strife implacable; neither be as two
ravening whelps that, having chanced on a kid in the dells of the
mountain, dispute thereover, dragging this way and that with gnashing
jaws. For to youth belong anger and biting words, but to soothe is
the gi