But his feelings were too deep for his rhymes, and his rhymes were poorer than his average, because his feeling was deeper.

He must have burned up hundreds of couplets, triplets, and sextuplets in the next fortnight.

For, besides his chivalrous and poetic gallantry toward womankind, he found himself hopelessly in love with a girl whom he would no more have thought of marrying than he would of wedding a real angel.

Sometimes he dreamed of going to school and getting an education, "puttin' some school-master's hair-ile onter his talk," as he called it, but then the hopelessness of any attempt to change himself deterred him.

But thenceforth Katy became more to him than Laura was to Petrarch.