Well, the heap's down yonder-- There, at the turning. Ah, the bonnie babe! We had no children, mistress. And what can any old man do with shillings, With no one but himself to spend them on-- An idle, good-for-nothing, lone old man? The curious structure of the verse is apparent at a glance--the irregular pattern, the extreme variation in the length of the line, the absence of rhyme and the strange metrical effects. It is a new poetical instrument, having little outward resemblance to the grace and dignity of regular forms. Its unfamiliarity may displease the eye and the ear at first, but it is not long before we perceive the design which controls its apparent waywardness, and recognize its fitness to express the life that the poet has chosen to depict. For it suggests, as no rhyme or regular measure could, the ruggedness of this existence and the characteristic utterance of its people. No symmetrical verse, with its sense of something complete, precise and clear, could convey such an impression as this--of speech struggling against natural reticence to express the turmoil of thought and emotion in an untrained mind. Mr Gibson has invented a metrical form which admirably produces that effect, without condescending to a crude realism. He has made the worker articulate, supplying just the coherence and lucidity which art demands, but preserving, in this irregular outline, in the plain diction and simple phrasing, an acute sense of reality. Here is a fragment of conversation, one of many similar, in which this verse is found to be a perfect medium of the idea. A wife has been struck by her husband in a fit of passion: she has been trying to hide from her mother the cause of the blow, but she is still weak from the effects of it and has not lied skilfully. Her mother gently protests that she is trying to screen her husband: Nay! There's naught to screen. 'Twas I that ... Nay! And, if he's hot, at times, You know he's much to try him; The racket that he works in, all day long, Would wear the best of tempers. Why, mother, who should know as well as you How soon a riveter is done? The hammers break a man, before his time; And father was a shattered man at forty; And Philip's thirty-five; And if he's failed a bit ... And, sometimes, over-hasty, Well, I am hasty, too; You know my temper; no one knows it better.