'Let me point out,' said he, 'that you have made the lady run barefoot at the very time when she would be most certain to put on her shoes and stockings. And that error vitiates the whole poem. For the wind is severe, you will notice. So when she reprimands the storm, she should really reprimand herself for her inconceivable folly.' 'But Smilinda has no shoes and stockings at all in the poem,' replied Wogan triumphantly. 'That hardly betters the matter,' returned Scrope. 'For in that case her feet might be bare but they would certainly not be snowy.' He stooped down as he spoke and drew from under the seat a bottle of wine, which he opened. 'This,' he said, 'may help us to consider the poem in a more charitable light.' He gave Wogan the bottle to hold, and stooping once more fetched out a couple of glasses. Then he held one in each hand. 'Now will you fill them?' he said. Wogan poured out the wine and while pouring it: 'Two glasses?' he remarked. 'It seems you came prepared for the conversation.' Scrope raised his eyes quickly to Wogan's face, and dropped them again to the glasses. 'One might easily have been broken,' he explained. They leaned back in the chaise, each with a glass in his hand. 'It is to your taste, I hope,' said Scrope courteously. Wogan smacked his lips in contentment. 'Lord Oxford has no better in his cellars.' 'I may agree without boastfulness. It is indeed Florence of a rare vintage, which I was at some pains to procure.' He laughed with a spice of savagery and resumed the consideration of Wogan's verses. 'You seem to me to have missed the opportunity afforded by your gale of wind. A true poet would surely have made great play with the lady's petticoats.' 'Smilinda had none,' again replied Wogan in triumph, and he emptied his glass. 'No shoes and stockings and no petticoats,' said he in a shocked voice. 'It is well you wrote a poem about her instead of painting her portrait,' and he filled Wogan's glass again, and added a little to his own, which was no more than half empty. 'Don't you comprehend, my friend,' exclaimed Wogan, 'that Smilinda's a nymph, an ancient Roman nymph?' 'Oh, she's a nymph!' 'Yes, and so wears no clothes but a sort of linsey-wolsey garment kirtled up to her knees.' 'Well, let that pass. But here's a line I view with profound discontent. "The grass will all its prickles hide." Thistles have prickles, Mr. Wogan, but the grass has blades like you and me; only, unlike you and me, it has no scabbards to sheathe them in.' 'Well,' said Wogan, 'but that's very wittily said,' and he laughed and chuckled. 'It is not bad, upon my faith,' replied Scrope. 'Let us drink to it in full glasses.' He emptied the bottle into Wogan's glass and tossed it into the road. 'Now here's something more. The wind, you observe, makes lutestrings of Smilinda's hair.' 'There is little fault to be discovered in that image, I fancy,' said Wogan, lifting his glass to his lips with a smile.