"Life! How true!" says the hostess. "But won't you give us something else? That one ended so very suddenly."
After much inward (and outward) wrestling Miss Herrick announces:
A THOUGHT
The music falls across the vale
From nightingale to nightingale;
The owl within the ivied tree
Makes love to me, makes love to me;
But all the tadpoles in the pond
Are dumb—however fond.
"I begin to think that there is something in a tadpole after all," murmurs Lord Poldoodle to himself, as the author wriggles her way out.
"After all," says one guest to another, "why shouldn't a tadpole make love as much as anybody else?"
"I think," says her neighbour, "that the idea is of youth trying vainly to express itself—or am I thinking of caterpillars? Lord Poldoodle, what is a tadpole exactly?"
"A tadpole," he answers decisively, "is an extremely immature wriggling creature, which is, quite rightly, dumb."
Now steps forward Mr. Horatio Bullfinch, full of simple enthusiasm, one of the London school. He gives us his famous poem, "Berkeley Square."
The men who come from the north country
Are tall and very fair,
The men who come from the south country
Have hardly any hair,
But the only men in the world for me
Are the men of Berkeley Square.