The Concert Rehearsal.
Wolstan Dixey.
Oh, it was a musical old Beetle!
And oh, it was a honey-throated Bee!
But the dandified young Hopper,
He couldn’t sing it proper,
And the Cricket—out of tune was he.
They sung and they sung,
And the harebells swung
A tinkling obligato in the breeze;
While the Beetle, singing-master,
Tried to make them sing it faster,
By patting off the tempo on his knees.
And oh! it was a Robin overheard them,
Who happened out a-walking in the glade,
And he laughed in every feather
When they tried to sing together
At the funny little noises that they made.
He listened and he listened,
And his eyes they fairly glistened
As the Bee so sweetly bumbled out the air;
But the Cricket struck another,
And the Robin thought he’d smother
Trying not to let them know that he was there.
Then oh, the Bee declared that “It was shameful!”
And angrily sipped honey from a comb;
“She was ruining her throat
And wouldn’t sing another note
Until the others studied it at home!”
The Cricket said that he
Never could keep in the key
When the wind was blowing that way from the south,
And young Hopper made excuses
In reply to these abuses,
That he had too much molasses in his mouth.
Then oh! the beetle-headed old conductor
Arose and made a few remarks in turn;
“The soprano is so vicious
And affairs so unpropitious,
The best thing we can do is to adjourn.
“Taking everything together,
The molasses and the weather,
And the fact that we can’t any of us sing,
There is quite sufficient reason
That we wait another season
And postpone our little concert till the spring!”