"You're no help here anyway," he said, putting the lunch packages in
a large plastic bag he'd found somewhere. "No use letting these go to
waste."
I didn't tell him I had the clue to Uncle Isadore's fortune in my hand.
He didn't know Uncle Isadore, so he wouldn't have believed me.
Nothing is more uncomfortable than reading an antique book. There is
no way to lie back and flash it on a screen or run the tape over your
reading glasses while you lie prone and relax. You have to _hold_ it.
If you try to hold it lying down, your arms get tired. If you put it
down on a table to read, your neck gets tired from bending over. And
the pages keep flipping and make you lose your place.
Still, I read it all the way through. It wasn't too bad. Not like Edgar
Guest, of course, who was the only ancient author I liked in General
Studies. But I found there was a sort of Grilch Hop beat to it that
reminded me of the Footlooses I used to go to in Middle School. I
grinned. It was funny to think of now.
I found no clues in the book. The only thing to do was read it again,
more carefully.
* * * * *
I noticed there was one poem with a _real_ Grilch Hop beat. I thought
suddenly of Sally, my regular partner at the Footlooses. She was very
blonde and she affected a green crestwave in her hair, pulled over her
forehead with a diamond clip. She was a beauty, all right. But she was
a little silly. And she had that tendency to overdress.
No, I sighed, she wouldn't have done for a studs and neck clasp man.
But I couldn't help wondering where she was now and what she was like
now. Did she remember me, and did she think about me when she heard
that song we used to dance to, because it was about a girl named Sally?
Once I knew a girl named Sally
Met her at a Footloose rally
I began humming the Grilch Hop tune to the ancient poem in Uncle Algy's
book. It was fantastic how closely it fitted, though, of course, the
words in the poem were plain silly.
But imagine finding a poem with a perfect Grilch Hop beat before
anybody even knew what a grilch was! Before Venus was even discovered.
Jump on both feet. Hop three times on the left foot. Jump. Hop three
times on the right foot. The rhythm was correct, right down to the
breakaway and four-step at the end of each run.
It was while I was singing this poem to a Grilch Hop tune that I
noticed the clue. The poem was named "The Dodo." And the rhyming was
very smooth until I came to the lines:
"Though thy crest be shorn and shaven,
Thou," I said, "art like a Raven
Ghastly, grim, and ancient Dodo,
Wandering from the Nightly shore;
Tell me what thy lordly name is
On the Night's Plutonian shore."
Quoth the Dodo, "Isadore."
Now the author had gone to a lot of trouble in the previous verse not
to break the Grilch Hop rhyme scheme. He made "thereat is" rhyme with
"lattice" and "that is." Why did he follow "shaven" and "raven" with
"Dodo"?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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