He can take a bunch of the English language and flatten it out around the edges till it looks quite poetic, but that doesn't make him a George O. Khayaam.
Not at all.
The trouble with Bunch is that his home folks have swelled his chest to such an extent by petting his adjectives that he thinks he has Shakespeare on a hot skiddoo for the sand dunes, and when it comes to that poetry thing he thinks he can make Hank Longfellow beat it up a tree.
Bunch lives out in Westchester County in one of those hand-painted suburbs where everybody knows everybody else's business and forgets his own.
Bunch and Alice joined the local club, of course, and when Bunch read some of his poetical outbursts at a 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: