to see what had happened, and the
Member of the Haouse cried, Order! Order! and the Salesman said, Shut
up, cash-boy! and the rest of the boarders kept on feeding; except the
Master, who looked very hard but half approvingly at the small intruder,
who had come about as nearly right as most professors would have done.

--You poets,--the Master said after this excitement had calmed down,
--you poets have one thing about you that is odd. You talk about
everything as if you knew more about it than the people whose business it
is to know all about it. I suppose you do a little of what we teachers
used to call "cramming" now and then?

--If you like your breakfast you must n't ask the cook too many
questions,--I answered.

--Oh, come now, don't be afraid of letting out your secrets. I have a
notion I can tell a poet that gets himself up just as I can tell a
make-believe old man on the stage by the line where the gray skullcap
joins the smooth forehead of the young fellow of seventy. You'll confess
to a rhyming dictionary anyhow, won't you?

--I would as lief use that as any other dictionary, but I don't want it.
When a word comes up fit to end a line with I can feel all the rhymes in
the language that are fit to go with it without naming them. I have
tried them all so many times, I know all the polygamous words and all the
monogamous ones, and all the unmarrying ones,--the whole lot that have no
mates,--as soon as I hear their names called. Sometimes I run over a
string of rhymes, but generally speaking it is strange what a short list
it is of those that are good for anything. That is the pitiful side of
all rhymed verse. Take two such words as home and world. What can you
do with chrome or loam or gnome or tome? You have dome, foam, and roam,
and not much more to use in your pome, as some of our fellow-countrymen
call it. As for world, you know that in all human probability somebody
or something will be hurled into it or out of it; its clouds may be
furled or its grass impearled; possibly something may be whirled, or
curled, or have swirled, one of Leigh Hunt's words, which with lush, one
of Keats's, is an important part of the stock in trade of some dealers in
rhyme.

--And how much do you versifiers know of all those arts and sciences you
refer to as if you were as familiar with them as a cobbler is with his
wax and lapstone?

--Enough not to make too many mistakes. The best way is to ask some
expert bef