And now the twilight shadows on
The distant mountain flutter,
And thou, my fair and good friend John,
Wilt kindly pass the butter!
What are you going to do with a man who has a bug like that?
What would you do, if while sitting at breakfast with an old chum, he suddenly yelped in accents wild:
The palpitating Elsewhere shrinks
Before that glamorous host,
Eftsoon, aye, now, good friend, methinks
That thou would'st have more toast!
It was clearly up to me to hand Bunch a good hard bump and wake him up before that poetry germ began to bite his arm off.
Bunch told me that in response to the urgent demands of his Westchester friends, he contemplated getting out a little book of his poems, and this was my cue.
I figured it out that the antithesis of a book of poetry would be a cook book, so I hustled.
In a few days I had the book framed up; a few days later it was printed, and before very long Bunch's Westchester society friends were grabbing for what they supposed was his feverish output of poesy.
This is what they got: