It was the dream of Dicky’s life though, as well as of Jack Bell’s, to compose a song themselves. They had no scruples about adapting somebody else’s music, but they burned with ambition to create a new set of words which rhymed. Many a night before it was time for Jack’s watch to begin, would he and Dicky struggle over a slate on which they had marked lines, something like this:—
____sea
____be
____shore
____gore
____sail
____hail
But they never got any farther.
“Seems to me, young ’un,” said Jack, scratching his head, “we’re beginnin’ at the wrong end. It’s stern foremost, d’ye see?”
“Yes, sir,” Dicky would reply, “but in poetry I believe you are obliged to begin stern foremost—because if you begin at the beginning you never get any poetry—just as if it was makin’ a song like this:—