"Yes!" Hippias quavered; looking up from the usual subject of his contemplation, and trying to take an interest in him, "fine old fellow!"
"What a chuckle he gives out before he flies! Not unlike July nightingales. You know that bird I told you of—the blackbird that had its mate shot, and used to come to sing to old Dame Bakewell's bird from the tree opposite. A rascal knocked it over the day before yesterday, and the dame says her bird hasn't sung a note since."
"Extraordinary!" Hippias muttered abstractedly. "I remember the verses."
"But where's your moral?" interposed the wrathful Adrian. "Where's constancy rewarded?
'The ouzel-cock so black of hue,
With orange-tawny bill;
The rascal with his aim so true;
The Poet's little quill!'
"Where's the moral of that? except that all's game to the poet! Certainly we have a noble example of the devotedness of the female, who for three entire days refuses to make herself heard, on account of a defunct male. I suppose that's what Ricky dwells on."
"As you please, my dear Adrian," says Richard, and points out larch-buds to his uncle, as they ride by the young green wood.
The wise youth was driven to extremity. Such a lapse from his pupil's heroics to this last verge of Arcadian coolness, Adrian could not believe in. "Hark at this old blackbird!" he cried, in his turn, and pretending to interpret his fits of song:
"Oh, what a pretty comedy!—Don't we wear the mask well, my Fiesco?— Genoa will be our own to-morrow!—Only wait until the train has started— jolly! jolly! jolly! We'll be winners yet!
"Not a bad verse—eh, Ricky? my Lucius Junius!"