“All right,” said Edward. “What do you want?”
“Anything that’ll light a fire in the rain! Sing us something funny. Sing us a story.”
“There was a ram of Derby,”
sang Edward—
“As I have heard it said,
That was the fattest ram, sir,
That ever had a head—”
The cypress wood ended. They came out into vast cotton-fields where the drowning bolls, great melancholy snowflakes, clung to the bushes, idle as weeds, careless of famine in mill-towns oversea. The water stood between the rows, rows that ran endlessly, cut from sight at last by a whirling and formless grey vapour.
“The fleece that grew on that ram, sir,
It grew so mighty high,