When he had finished, he took her pretty hand in his gnarly, bony one and patted the white firm flesh tenderly as he peered back through the years.

"U-h-m, that was years and years ago, Jeanette--years and years ago, and Nellie had just bought me my rhyming dictionary.

It was the first time I had a chance to use it." The lyrical artist drummed with his fingers on the mahogany arm of the sofa.

"My goodness, child--what a long column there was of words rhyming with 'ette.'" He laughed to himself as he mused: "You know, my dear, I had to let 'brevet' and 'fret' and 'roulette' go, because I couldn't think of anything to say about them.
You don't know how that worries a poet." He looked at the verses in the book before him and then shook his head sadly: "I was young then--it seems strange to think I could write that.

Youth, youth," he sighed as he patted the fresh young hand beside him, "it is not by chance you rhyme with truth." His eyes glistened, and the girl put her cheek against his and squeezed the thin, trembling hand as she cried, "Oh, Uncle Watts, Uncle Watts, you're a dear--a regular dear!" "In his latter days," writes Colonel Culpepper, in the second edition of the Biography, "those subterranean fires of life that flowed so fervently in his youth and manhood smouldered, and he did not write often.