All the leafy oaks were slumb'rous; Slumb'rous e'en the honey-bee; And his larger brother, cumbrous, Humming home with golden knee. But the blackbird, king of hedgerows-- Hedgerows to my memory dear-- By the brook, where rush and sedge grows, Sang his liquid love-notes clear. Margaret, toying with a June rose--the white petal delicately tinted with pink between her soft rosy fingers--dreamily repeated half to herself,-- "All the leafy oaks were slumb'rous." Valentine glanced at her swiftly, and inwardly resolved to remove the impression on her mind. He took out his pocket-book. "My verses," said he, "are only copied, but they seemed to me a gem in their way. It is a piece of Bacchic meditation from the Vaux de Vire, exquisitely translated by some clever author whose name I have forgotten. You are gazing at our friend Augustus' bibulous nose," he nodded towards the recumbent figure with the hand on the bottle, "and see it through your own glass: "Fair nose! whose beauties many pipes have cost Of white and rosy wine; Whose colours are so gorgeously embossed In red and purple fine; Great nose, who views thee, gazing through great glass, Thee still more lovely thinks. Thou dost the nose of creature far surpass Who only water drinks." It was so appropriate to poor Augustus that they could not choose but smile. Valentine begged Margaret to sing: they all joined in the request, and she sang with a faint blush, looking down--for she knew, though the rest did not, that it was Geoffrey's favourite--the beautiful old ballad of the "Bailiff's Daughter of Islington." With the wild-rose in her hand, the delicate bloom on her cheek, the green hedge behind, the green elm above, and the sweet scent of the hay, she looked the ballad as well as sang it. "Ah," said Felix, "no sign of study in those old ballads, no premeditation, no word-twisting and jerking; rugged metre so involved that none can understand it without pondering an hour or two. This is the way we criticise poetry now-a-days, in our mechanical age--just listen: somebody has been measuring Tennyson with a foot-rule. I read from a professor's analysis--`The line is varied by dactylic or iambic substitution, as well as by truncation and anacrusis;' `the line is varied by anapaestic and trochaic (rarely dactylic) substitutions, and by initial truncation.' As Faust says, not all these word-twisters have ever made a Maker yet." Crash!--splintering of wood and breaking of boughs. "Here gwoes! Come on, you! Hoorah! Us ull put it up, missus; doan't 'ee be afeared! you bin a good missus to we. So into't, you vellers!"