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 before one risks himself very far in illustrations from a branch
he does not know much about. Suppose, for instance, I wanted to use the
double star to illustrate anything, say the relation of two human souls
to each other, what would I--do? Why, I would ask our young friend
there to let me look at one of those loving celestial pairs through his
telescope, and I don't doubt he'd let me do so, and tell me their names
and all I wanted to know about them.

--I should be most happy to show any of the double stars or whatever
else there might be to see in the heavens to any of our friends at this
table,--the young man said, so cordially and kindly that it was a real
invitation.

--Show us the man in the moon,--said That Boy.--I should so like to
see a double star!--said Scheherezade, with a very pretty air of smiling
modesty.

--Will you go, if we make up a party?--I asked the Master.

--A cold in the head lasts me from thre