city."

[Footnote 2: I suggested to Mrs. Abel that this word wouldn't do, and
proposed "Snarleyology" instead. She declined the improvement at once,
remarking that 'the soul of the word was in the _ch_.']

[Footnote 3: The name of the greatest of the Perryman rams--a brute
"with more decorations than a Field-marshal."]

I was forced into silence for a time, bewildered by a statement which
seemed to alternate between levelling the big things down to the little
ones, and raising the little ones to the level of the big. When I had
chewed this hard saying as well as I could, I bolted it for further
digestion, and continued the conversation. "Has Snarley," I asked, "ever
been tried with poetry, in the ordinary sense of the term?"

"Yes," said the lady, "an experiment was once made on him by Miss ----"
(naming a literary counterpart to Lady Lottie Passingham), "who visited
him in his cottage and insisted on reading him some poem of Whittier's.
In ten minutes she was fleeing from the cottage in terror of her life,
and no one has since repeated the experiment."

"I think," I said, "that if you would consent to be the experimenter we
might obtain better results."

Now in one important respect Nature had dealt more bountifully with Mrs.
Abel than with Lady Lottie Passingham. Though Mrs. Abel had no desire to
reform the universe, and was conscious of no mission to that end, she
possessed a voice which might have produced a revolution. It was a soft
contralto, vibrant and rich, and tremulous with tones which the gods
would have come from Olympus to hear. She never sang, but her speech was
music, rich and rare. In early life, as I have said, she had been on the
stage, and Art had completed the gifts of Nature. Here lay one of the
secrets of her power over the soul of Snarley Bob. Her voice was
hypnotic with all men, and Snarley yielded to it as to a spell.

Another point which has its bearing on this, and also on what has to
follow, is that Snarley had a passionate love for the song of the
nightingale. The birds haunted the district in great numbers, and the
time of their singing was the time when Snarley "let out his line" to
its furthest limits. His love of the nightingale was coupled, strangely
enough, with a hatred equally intense for the cuckoo. To the song of the
cuckoo in early spring he was fairly tolerant; but in June, when, as
everybody knows, "she changeth her tune," Snarley's rage broke forth
into bitter persecuti