I shook my head regretfully, but Ajax spoke enthusiastically of the
lady's powers as a vocalist. He had previously described her voice to
me as "a full choke, warranted to kill stone-dead at sixty yards."

"It is a lovely voice," sighed Jasperson, "strong, an' full, an' rich.
Why, there ain't an organ in the county can down her high B!" Then,
warmed by my brother's sympathy, he fumbled in his pocket, and found a
sheet of note-paper. Upon this he had written a quatrain that he
proposed to read to us _au clair de la lune_. The lines were
addressed: "To My Own Blackbird."

"She's a pernounced brunette," explained the poet; "and her name is
Birdie. I thought some of entitlin' the pome: 'To a Mocking Bird'; but
I surmised that would sound too pussonal. She has mocked me, an'
others, more'n once."

He sighed, still smarting at the memory of a gibe; then he recited the
following in an effective monotone:--

"Oh! scorn not the humble worm, proud bird,
As you sing i' the top o' the tree;
Though doomed to squirm i' the ground, unheard.
He'll make a square meal for thee."

"It ain't Shakespeare," murmured the bard, "but the idee is O.K."

My brother commended the lines as lacking neither rhyme nor reason,
but he questioned the propriety of alluding to a lady's appetite, and
protested strongly against the use of that abject word--worm. He told