And now the dear, too brief holiday was drawing to a close. To-morrow would see the house party scattered to the four winds. This was the last frolic they would have in the water.
“Oh, dear,” lamented Arline, her blue eyes mournful with regret, “why is it that perfectly lovely times go by like a flash, while horrid, disagreeable ones last forever?”
“’Tis the way of life, my child. ‘It is not always May,’” quoted Emma sentimentally. “I might as well add, right here and now, that I’m glad of it. May is a dubious and disappointing month, dears. It always pours barrels on the first. It’s a shame, too, when one stops to consider all the poems that have been composed about that weepy, fickle first day of May.
“Oh, radiant May day,
This is our play day.
Youth is in its hey day;
Hail we this gay day;
Park clouds away day.
“And then down comes the rain and spoils it all,” finished the versifier, lapsing into prose.
Emma’s improvisation was greeted with laughter.
“It sounds just about as sensible as a whole lot of those old English verses,” declared Elfreda, who was not fond of poetry.
“It was a deadly insult to English verse,” defended Anne Pierson with twinkling eyes. “You can’t expect me to let it pass unnoticed.”
“Having been fed as a babe on Shakespeare,” agreed Emma, “I will admit that it gives you some room for criticism, but as a dutiful teacher of English I feel it entirely within my province to break forth occasionally into such English ditties as happen to come to my mind, regardless of Shakespeare.”
“Oh, do say another,” begged the Emerson twins. They especially delighted in Emma’s poetical outbursts.