"Alas, no!"
"Humph! You cannot possibly have been so foolish as to venture the brain-dizzying dangers of a course of the 'Thunderer's' tempestuous Home-Rule leaders?"
He had not, and intimated as much, mournfully.
"Dear me! Desperate man, do not say that you have been trying to analyse the authoritative 'Analyses' of this year's County Cricketing, to test their apportionment of champion honours, or track out their distracting decimals to their last hidden lair!"
"Worse than that—far worse!" he moonily muttered.
"You alarm me, rash man!" I cried. "Can it possibly be that from a comparison of the works of the (Sporting) Prophets you have foolishly essayed to spot the winner of the coming St. Leger?"
"No such luck," said he, with a shudder.
I drew near to him, and whispered low in his ear—
"Have you—have you been seeking the meaning of the verses of some peer-poet in the Morning Post?"
"Would—would it were but that," he groaned, picking a single straw from the truss or so that stuck porcupine-quill-wise in his tangled fell of hair.