rait, could not be prevailed upon, for a long while, to go alone
into a room where there were some family portraits. What comes next
after all these kisses?

AQUILIUS.--More kisses.

GRATIAN.--Then you force a bad pun from me, and put my aching bones into
an _omni-bus_, and it is as much as I can do to bear the shaking. Give
your account of them, Aquilius.

AQUILIUS.--AD LESBIAM.

How many kisses will suffice,
You ask me, Lesbia,--ask a lover!
Go bid him count the sands;--discover,
Even to a very grain precise,
How many lie in heaps, or hover,
When gusty winds the sand hills stir
About the benzoin-bearing plain,
Between Jove's Cyrenean fane,
And Battus' sacred sepulchre.

How many stars, in stillest night,
On loving thefts look down approving,--
So many kisses should requite
Catullus, ah too madly loving.--
Ye curious eyes, be closed in slumber,
That would be spies upon our wooing,
That there be none to note the number,
Nor tongue to babble of our doing.

GRATIAN.--Read that last again--for "my eyes," I confess, were not as
"curious" as they should have been, and were just closing as you came to
the wooing.

AQUILIUS.--

That there be none to note the number,
Nor tongue to babble of our doing.

GRATIAN.--Well, rubbing his eyes, I am quite awake now; let us have your
version, Master Curate.

CURATE.--AD LESBIAM.

Dost bid me, my Lesbia,
A number define,
To fill me, and glut me
With kisses of thine?

When equal thy kisses
The atoms of sand,
By spicy Cyrene
On Lybia's strand,

The sand grains extending
From Ammon's hot shrine,
To the tomb of old Battus,
That land-mark divine.

Or count me the star-lights
That see from above,
In still night, the thievings
Of mortals in love.

Thus canst thou, my Lesbia,
A number assign,
To glut thy mad lover
With kisses of thine.

A number the prying
To reckon may spare;
And gossips, unlucky,
Give up in despair.

GRATIAN.--(After a pause, his eyes half closed,)

"Give up in despair."

Very mu--si--cal--sooth--ing.

AQUILIUS.--See, you have set our host asleep; and, judging from his last
words, his dream will not be unpleasant. We must not come to a sudden
silence, or it will waken him. The murmur of the brook that invites
sleep, is pledged to its continuance. The winds and the pattering rain,
says the Roman elegiast,