I noticed there was one poem with a real Grilch Hop beat. I thought suddenly of Sally, my regular partner at the Footlooses. She was very blonde and she affected a green crestwave in her hair, pulled over her forehead with a diamond clip. She was a beauty, all right. But she was a little silly. And she had that tendency to overdress.

No, I sighed, she wouldn't have done for a studs and neck clasp man. But I couldn't help wondering where she was now and what she was like now. Did she remember me, and did she think about me when she heard that song we used to dance to, because it was about a girl named Sally?

I began humming the Grilch Hop tune to the ancient poem in Uncle Algy's book. It was fantastic how closely it fitted, though, of course, the words in the poem were plain silly.

But imagine finding a poem with a perfect Grilch Hop beat before anybody even knew what a grilch was! Before Venus was even discovered. Jump on both feet. Hop three times on the left foot. Jump. Hop three times on the right foot. The rhythm was correct, right down to the breakaway and four-step at the end of each run.

It was while I was singing this poem to a Grilch Hop tune that I noticed the clue. The poem was named "The Dodo." And the rhyming was very smooth until I came to the lines:

Now the author had gone to a lot of trouble in the previous verse not to break the Grilch Hop rhyme scheme. He made "thereat is" rhyme with "lattice" and "that is." Why did he follow "shaven" and "raven" with "Dodo"?

Furthermore, it had not struck me the first time I read the poem quickly that there was anything odd about a bird being named "Isadore." People who keep pet grilches frequently name them after famous Reed players and Isadore is a common name.

On the other hand, it was my Uncle's name. And the word "Dodo" didn't rhyme as it should.

I got out a magnifying glass to examine the ancient print. Sure enough, it had been tampered with. The print looked so odd to me, anyway, I hadn't noticed the part that had been changed. But it was obvious under the glass that "Dodo" had been substituted for a word of almost equal length. The same with "Isadore."

I went over the whole poem now, carefully, to see which words had been changed. There weren't many. "White" in a couple of places. "Dodo" and "Isadore" wherever they occurred. An "o" in the line "Perfume from an unseen censor." 

 Prev. P 10/24 next