d the shouting and the singing'"--

"Vereeniginging is good, but why widgeon?"

"Why not? Anything that winged westward would naturally begin with a
_w_."

"Need it wing westward?"

"The bird must go somewhere. You wouldn't have it hang around and look
foolish. Then I've brought in something about the heedless hartebeest
galloping over the deserted veldt."

"Of course you know it's practically extinct in those regions?"

"I can't help _that_, it gallops so nicely. I make it have all sorts of
unexpected yearnings--

'Mother, may I go and maffick,
Tear around and hinder traffic?'

Of course you'll say there would be no traffic worth bothering about on
the bare and sun-scorched veldt, but there's no other word that rhymes
with maffick."

"Seraphic?"

Reginald considered. "It might do, but I've got a lot about angels later
on. You must have angels in a Peace poem; I know dreadfully little about
their habits."

"They can do unexpected things, like the hartebeest."

"Of course. Then I turn on London, the City of Dreadful Nocturnes,
resonant with hymns of joy and thanksgiving--

'And the sleeper, eye unlidding,
Heard a voice for ever bidding
Much farewell to Dolly Gray;
Turning weary on his truckle-
Bed he heard the honey-suckle
Lauded in apiarian lay.'

Longfellow at his best wrote nothing like that."

"I agree with you."

"I wish you wouldn't. I've a sweet temper, but I can't stand being
agreed with. And I'm so worried about the aasvogel."

Reginald stared dismally at the biscuit-tin, which now presented an
unattractive array of rejected cracknels.

"I believe," he murmured, "if I could find a woman with an unsatisfied
craving for cracknels, I should marry her."

"What is the tragedy of the aasvogel?" asked the Other sympathetically.

"Oh, simply that there's no rhyme for it. I thought about it all the
time I was dressing--it's dreadfully bad for one to think whilst one's
dressing--and all lunch-time, and I'm still hung up over it. I feel like
those unfortunate automobilists who achieve an unenviable motoriety by
coming to a hopeless stop with their cars in the most crowded
thoroughfares. I'm afraid I shall have to drop the aasvogel, and it did
give such lovely local colour to the thing."

"Still you've got the heedless hartebeest."

"And quite a decorative bit of moral admonition--when you've worried the
meaning out--

'Cease, War, thy bubbling madness