him to fresh effort with every carnal lure the pantry afforded, but
invariably he failed at a point where the soul of the toper was going
"down--_down_--DOWN--into the bottomless depths of HELL!" Here he became
pitiful in his ineffectiveness, and Clytie had at last to admit that he
would never be the elocutionist Allan was. "But, my Land!" she would say,
at each of his failures, "if you only _could_ do it the way Mr. Murphy
did--and then he'd talk so plain and natural, too,--just like he was
associating with a body in their own parlour--and so pathetic it made a
body simply bawl. My suz! how I did love to set and hear that man tell
what a sot he'd been!"

However, Clytie happily discovered that the littler boy's memory was more
tenacious of rhyme, so she successfully taught him certain metrical
conceits that had been her own to learn in girlhood, beginning with pithy
couplets such as:

"Xerxes the Great did die
And so must you and I."

"As runs the glass
Man's life must pass."

"Thy life to mend
God's book attend."

From these it was a step entirely practicable to longer warnings, one of
her favourites being:

UNCERTAINTY OF LIFE