Did you ride over from Greenwood to be scornful ?" "I rode over to be as meek as Moses and as patient as Job--" "They were never my favourites in Scripture." "Nor mine." He closed the book, swung his arm, and Pope crashed into a lilac bush.

"There," he said, "goes meekness, patience, and the eighteenth century.

This is the nineteenth.

Time is no endless draught, no bottomless cup.

Waste of life is the cankered rose.