Guardian: (Standing, leaning on a stick, to
address them.) It's a pity that these being holidays,
your teachers and tutors are far away.
Gone off afloat in a cedar boat to a College of
Learning out in Cathay.
1st Prince: It's a pity indeed they're not here
to-day.
Guardian: For it's likely you looked in your
almanacs, or judged by the shape of the lessening
moon, That your Godmother's Dowager Messengers are
due to arrive this afternoon.
2nd Prince: We did and we think they'll be
here very soon.
Guardian: But I know they'll be glad that each
royal lad, put under my rule in place of a school,
Can fashion his life without trouble or strife, and
be shielded from care in a nice easy chair.
3rd Prince: As we always are and we always
were.
Guardian: It is part of my knowledge that lads
in a college, and made play one and all with a bat
and a ball,
Come often to harm with a knock on the arm,
and their hands get as hard as the hands of a clown.
4th Prince: But ours are as soft as thistledown.
Guardian: And I've seen young princes not
far from your age, go chasing beasts on a winter day,
And carted home with a broken bone, and a
yard of a doctor's bill to pay;
Or going to sail in the teeth of a gale, when the
waves were rising mountains high,
Or fall from a height that was near out of sight,
robbing rooks from their nest in a poplar tree.