Bernal came to know it all as far as the stanza--

"I loved to hear the banjo hum,
It sounds so very calmly;
If a happy home you wish to find,
Visit the Thompson family."

After this the verses became less direct, and, to his mind, rather wordy
and purposeless, though he never failed of joy in the mere verbal music of
them when Clytie read, with sometimes a kind of warm tremble in her
voice--

"At lovers' promises fates grow merrilee;
Some are made on land,
Some on the deep sea.
Love does sometimes leave
Streams of tears."

He thought she looked very beautiful when she read this, in a voice that
sounded like crying, with her big, square face, her fat cheeks that looked
like russet apples, her very tiny black moustache, her smooth, oily black
hair with a semicircle of tight little curls over her brow, and her
beautiful, big, rounded, shining forehead.

Yet he preferred her poems of action, like that of Salmon Faubel, whose
bride became so homesick in Edom that she was in a way to perish, so that
Salmon took her to her home and found work there for himself. He even
sang one catchy couplet of this to music of his own: