good old ditty for the sixth time:

"Weel may the keel row, the keel row, the keel row,
Weel may the keel row
That brings my laddie home!"

which he would find rather difficult to render literally into
colloquial seafaring French!

He translated it thus:

"Vogue la carene,
Vogue la carene
Qui me ramene
Mon bien aime!"

"Ah! vous verrez," says Bonzig--"vous verrez, aux prochaines
vacances de Paques--je ferai un si joli tableau de tout ca! avec la
brume du soir qui tombe, vous savez--et le soleil qui disparait--et
la maree qui monte et la lune qui se leve a l'horizon! et les
mouettes et les goelands--et les bruyeres lointaines--et le vieux
manoir seigneurial de votre grand-pere ... c'est bien ca, n'est-ce
pas?"

"Oui, oui, M'sieur Bonzig--vous y etes, en plein!"

And the good usher in his excitement would light himself a cigarette
of caporal, and inhale the smoke as if it were a sea-breeze, and
exhale it like a regular sou'-wester! and sing:

"Ouile--me--sekile ro,
Tat brinn my ladde ome!"

Barty also brought back with him the complete poetical works of
Byron and Thomas Moore, the gift of his noble grandfather, who
adored these two bards to the exclusion of all other bards that ever
wrote in English. And during that year we both got to know them,
possibly as well as Lord Whitby himself. Especially "Don Juan," in
which we grew to be as word-perfect as in _Polyeucte_, _Le
Misanthrope_, _Athalie_, _Philoctete_, _Le Lutrin_, the first six
books of the AEneid and the Iliad, the _Ars Poetica_, and the _Art
Poetique_ (Boileau).

Every line of these has gone out of my head--long ago, alas! But I
could still stand a pretty severe examination in the now
all-but-forgotten English epic--from Dan to Beersheba--I mean from
"I want a hero" to "The phantom of her frolic grace, Fitz-Fulke!"

Barty, however, remembered everything--what he ought to, and what he
ought not! He had the most astounding memory: wax to receive and
marble to retain; also a wonderful facility for writing verse,
mostly comic, both in English and French. Greek and Latin verse were
not taught us at Brossard's, for good French reasons, into which I
will not enter now.

We also grew very fond of Lamartine and Victor Hugo, quite
openly--and of De Musset under the rose.

"C'etait dans la nuit brune
Sur le clocher jauni,
La lune,
Comme un point sur son i!"

(not for the y