"Bong tong," said Fred. "Well, I don't know Japanese."
"Never mind. Just listen to this. I'm going to recite. Father makes me do it. Now here is the scene. You are a baronet and I am Bobbie Burns. I have been visiting you, you know, staying a few days at your mansion, when a nobleman—a downright cad—comes also to visit you, and you ask him if he would object to the ploughman poet dining with him.
"'What!' cries this ignoble nobleman, 'a ploughman singing fellow dining with you and me! How very absurd to be sure!'
"Then you, Sir Fred, are awfully put about, and you come to me sheepishly, and explain matters, and I bite my tongue and don't say anything.
"Well, after dinner his lordship says, 'Now, pon honour, I'd like to hear your singing fellow just for five minutes, don't-cher-know?'
"And so I—Robert Burns—am asked in.
"Of course I'm in a boiling rage at being treated thus. So I strut in and bow to you and his lordship, that is Toddie yonder.
"'Singing fellow,' says the lord, 'give us a specimen of your poetic powahs.'
"And this is the specimen I give:
"'Is there, for honest poverty,
That hangs his head, and a' that?
The coward-slave, we pass him by,
We dare be poor for a' that!
For a' that, and a' that,
Our toils obscure, and a' that,
The rank is but a guinea's stamp,
The man's the gowd* for a' that.