“On condition,” he said, deprecatingly, “that you write a song for the English.”
“Oh, very well,” said Patrick, with a huge sigh that really indicated the very opposite of reluctance. “We must do something till the thing stops, I suppose, and this seems a blameless parlour game. ‘Songs of the Car Club.’ Sounds quite aristocratic.”
And he began to make marks with a pencil on the fly-leaf of a little book he had in his pocket–Wilson’s Noctes Ambrosianae. Every now and then, however, he looked up and delayed his own composition by watching Pump and the dog, whose proceedings amused him very much. For the owner of “The Old Ship” sat sucking his pencil and looking at Mr. Quoodle with eyes of fathomless attention. Every now and then he slightly scratched his brown hair with the pencil, and wrote down a word. And the dog Quoodle, with that curious canine power of either understanding or most brazenly pretending to understand what is going on, sat erect with his head at an angle, as if he were sitting for his portrait.
Hence it happened that though Pump’s poem was a little long, as are often the poems of inexperienced poets, and though Dalroy’s poem was very short (being much hurried toward the end) the long poem was finished some time before the short one.
Therefore it was that there was first produced for the world the song more familiarly known as “No Noses,” or more correctly called “The Song of Quoodle.” Part of it ran eventually thus:–
“They haven’t got no noses
The fallen sons of Eve,
Even the smell of roses
Is not what they supposes,
But more than mind discloses,