It was quite improbable that anyone had, you know, and that's
where it stimulated the imagination and took people out of
their narrow, humdrum selves. No one has ever called me
narrow or humdrum, but even I felt worked up now and then at
the thought of that house with the stricken wombats in it.
It simply wasn't nice. But the editors were unanimous in
leaving it alone; they said the thing had been done before
and done worse, and that the market for that sort of work was
extremely limited.

It was just on the top of that discouragement that the
Duchess wanted me to write something in her album--something
Persian, you know, and just a little bit decadent--and I
thought a quatrain on an unwholesome egg would meet the
requirements of the case. So I started in with -


"Cackle, cackle, little hen,
How I wonder if and when
Once you laid the egg that I
Met, alas! too late. Amen."


The Duchess objected to the Amen, which I thought gave an air
of forgiveness and chose jugee to the whole thing; also she
said it wasn't Persian enough, as though I were trying to
sell her a kitten whose mother had married for love rather
than pedigree. So I recast it entirely, and the new version
read -