What was worse was that Hotaling, according to the University yearbook, was a poet.
But when the skipper interviewed Hotaling and found him to be a lean, muscular young man who'd obviously had a haircut in the past week and who laughed genuinely at one of the skipper's more purple stories, he signed him on immediately.
The skipper had one last thought. "You don't keep bees, do you?"
"Not even in my bonnet," Ernest said.
"Then we'll get along. Just keep your nursery rhymes to yourself."
"Aye, aye, sir," said Ernest.
"Look," Ernest told the skipper, "I've studied their literature, if that's what it is, until I'm saturated with it. Maybe it doesn't make sense to you but I've worked out a sort of pattern. It's an alien culture, sure, and there are gaps in it, but what there is fits together."
"All right," the skipper said. "I'm not questioning your findings. I just want to know why it has to be in that ridiculous rhyme."
"Because they were a poetic people, that's why. And it doesn't have to be in rhyme. I could give you the literal translation, but it was rhymed originally and when I make it rhyme in English too you get a more exact idea of the kind of people they were."