"Yes," she said slowly. "I will try——" She looked up at me. "——If you wish it."
"Try," I said.
Very quietly she turned and passed behind the punch bowl and into the next room, but did not close the door. And anybody could see her there, seated at the rough pine table, quill in hand, and sometimes motionless, absorbed in her own thoughts, sometimes scratching away at the sheet of paper under her nose with all the proper frenzy of a very poet.
We had emptied the punch bowl before she reappeared, holding out to me the paper which was still wet with ink. And they welcomed her lustily, glasses aloft, but I was in a cold fright for fear she had writ nothing extraordinary, and they might think meanly of her mind, which, after all, I myself knew little of save that it was sweet and generous.
But she seemed in no manner perturbed, waiting smilingly for the noise to quiet. Then she said:
"This is a toast that our poor tyrant-ridden countrymen may dare to offer at any banquet under any flag, and under the very cannon of New York."
She stood still, absent-eyed, thinking for a moment; then, looking up at us:
"It is really two poems in one. If you read it straight across the page as it is written, then does it seem to be a boastful, hateful Tory verse, vilifying all patriots, even His Excellency—God forgive the thought!
"But in the middle of every line there is a comma, splitting the line into two parts. And if you draw a line down through every one of these commas, dividing the written verse into two halves, each separate half will be a poem of itself, and the secret and concealed meaning of the whole will then be apparent."
She laid the paper in my hands; instantly everybody, a-tiptoe with curiosity, clustered around to see. And this is what we all read—the prettiest and most cunningly devised and disguised verse that ever was writ—or so it seems to me: