“Let me whisper it in your ear.”
“What! Oh, Standard, myself, as a child, have shouted myself hoarse applauding that very name in the theatre.”
“I have heard your poem was not very handsomely received,” said Standard, now suddenly shifting the subject.
“Not a word of that, for heaven’s sake!” cried I. “If Cicero, traveling in the East, found sympathetic solace for his grief in beholding the arid overthrow of a once gorgeous city, shall not my petty affair be as nothing, when I behold in Hautboy the vine and the rose climbing the shattered shafts of his tumbled temple of Fame?”
Next day I tore all my manuscripts, bought me a fiddle, and went to take regular lessons of Hautboy.
[POOR MAN’S PUDDING AND RICH MAN’S CRUMBS]
PICTURE FIRST
Poor Man’s Pudding
“You see,” said poet Blandmour, enthusiastically—as some forty years ago we walked along the road in a soft, moist snowfall, toward the end of March—“you see, my friend, that the blessed almoner, Nature, is in all things beneficent; and not only so, but considerate in her charities, as any discreet human philanthropist might be. This snow, now, which seems so unseasonable, is in fact just what a poor husbandman needs. Rightly is this soft March snow, falling just before seed-time, rightly it is called ‘Poor Man’s Manure.’ Distilling from kind heaven upon the soil, by a gentle penetration it nourishes every clod, ridge, and furrow. To the poor farmer it is as good as the rich farmer’s farmyard enrichments. And the poor man has no trouble to spread it, while the rich man has to spread his.”