free-and-easy one evening, Society got up on its hind legs and with one voice declared my old pal Jefferson to be the logical successor to Robert H. Browning, Sir Walter K. Scott, Bert Tennyson, or any other poet that ever shook a quill.

   Bunch began to fancy himself some—well, rather!

   When Peaches and I went out Westchester way a few weeks ago to spend a week-end with Bunch and Alice, all we heard was home-made poetry.

   When Bunch wasn't ladling out impromptu sonnets, Alice was reading one of his epics or throwing a fit over a "perfectly lovely" rondeau—whatever that may be.

   Even at meal times Bunch couldn't break away.

   With a voice full of emotion and vegetable soup he would exclaim:

   And now the twilight shadows on

    The distant mountain flutter,

   And thou, my fair and good friend John,

    Wilt kindly pass the butter!

   What are you going to do with a man who has a bug like that?

   What would you do, if while sitting at breakfast with an old chum, he suddenly yelped in accents wild:

   The palpitating Elsewhere shrinks

    Before that glamorous host,

   Eftsoon, aye, now, good friend, methinks

    That thou would'st have more toast!

   It was clearly up to me to hand Bunch a good hard bump and wake him up before that poetry germ began to bite his arm off.

   Bunch told me that in response to the urgent demands of his Westchester friends, he contemplated getting out a little book of his poems, and this was my cue.

 Prev. P 26/30 next