So discreetly, to the chime
Of the music that so sweetly
Marks the time.

But the chords begin to tinkle
Quicker,
And your feet they flash and flicker--
Twinkle!--
Flash and flutter to a tricksy
Fickle meter;
And you foot it like a pixie--
Only fleeter!

Not our current, dowdy
Things--
"Turkey trots" and rowdy
Flings--
For they made you overseas
In politer times than these
In an age when grace could please,
Ere St. Vitus
Clutched and shook us, spine and knees;
Loosed a plague of jerks to smite us!

But Marquis is more than the arbiter of dainty elegances in rhyme: he
sings and celebrates a robust world where men struggle upward from the
slime and discontent leaps from star to star. The evolutionary theme is
a favourite with him: the grand pageant of humanity groping from
Piltdown to Beacon Hill, winning in a million years two precarious
inches of forehead. Much more often than F.P.A., who used to be his