SYL.—You would take no forewarning—I bade you not pull up the blind. It was my intent to have broken the truth to you, after you had made a full meal; but now you must to breakfast with what appetite you may!
CIV.—As I hope to see Paradise—there is not a green bough between this and Peckham!
SYL.—No, truly, not a twig! I would not advise any forlorn Babes to die in our woods, for Cock Robin would be painfully perplext to provide them with a pall. Alas! were a Butterfly to be born in our bowers, there is not a leaf to swaddle it in.
BABES IN THE WOOD.
CIV.—Miserable man that I am, to have come down so late, or rather that winter should have arrived thus early! Ungenial climate! untimely Boreas!
SYL.—Blame not Boreas, nor winter neither. Boiling heat had more part than freezing point in this havoc. To think that even summer nowadays should go by steam!
CIV.—You speak in Sphynxian riddles! Oh, my Sylvanus, tell me in plain English prose what has become of the green emeralds of the forest?
SYL.—Destroyed in one day by a swarm of locusts. Not the locusts of Scripture, such as were eaten by St. John in the wilderness, but a new species. I caught one in the fact, on the very elm tree you wot of, and which it had stripped to the bone, saving one bough.
