“No, I can’t,” whispered Bramble in an audible voice. “I’ve forgotten the first line.”
“Something about a kid asleep,” suggested Padger, also audibly.
“Oh, yes,” said Bramble, starting up and blushing very red as he began.
“‘Lines on Seeing my Wife and Two Children Asleep’—Hood.”
This modest announcement of his subject was overwhelming in itself, and was greeted with such yells of laughter that the poor elocutionist found it utterly impossible to go on. He tried once or twice, but never got beyond the first half line.
“And has the earth—” and here he stuck, but in answer to the cheers began again, looking round for Padger to help.
“And has the earth—(Go it, Padger, give a fellow a leg up, can’t you?)”
“I can’t find the place,” said Padger, very hot and flurried, and whipping over the pages of a book with his moist thumb.
“And has the earth—(Look in the index, you lout! Oh, won’t I give it to you afterwards!)” once more began the wretched Bramble. He got no farther. Even had he remembered the words his voice could never have risen above the laughter, which continued as long as he remained on his feet.
He retired at length in dudgeon, and Stephen called on Paul for a song. This went off better, only everybody stamped the time with his feet, so that the singer could neither be heard for the row nor seen for the dust. After that followed another “reading.” This time the subject was a humorous one—“Ben Battle,” by T. Hood. Every one, by the way, chose Hood. It was the only poetry-book to be had in the Fourth Junior. The reading progressed satisfactorily for the first two lines—indeed, until a joke occurred, and here the reader was so overcome with the humour of the thing that he broke into a laugh, and every time he tried to begin the next line he laughed before he could get it out, until at last it got to be quite as monotonous as watching the hyena at the Zoological Gardens. Finally he did get through the line, but in a voice so weak, wavering by reason of his efforts not to laugh, that the effect was more ludicrous than ever. He could get no farther, however. For the recollection of the joke that had passed, and the anticipation of the one that was coming, fairly doubled him up, and he let the book drop out of his hands in the middle of one of his convulsions.