tell. I am being hypnotised by Bayly. I lisp in numbers, and the
numbers come like mad. I can hardly ask for a light without
abounding in his artless vein. Easy, easy it seems; and yet it was
Bayly after all, not you nor I, who wrote the classic -


"I'll hang my harp on a willow tree,
And I'll go to the war again,
For a peaceful home has no charm for me,
A battlefield no pain;
The lady I love will soon be a bride,
With a diadem on her brow.
Ah, why did she flatter my boyish pride?
She is going to leave me now!"


It is like listening, in the sad yellow evening, to the strains of a
barrel organ, faint and sweet, and far away. A world of memories
come jigging back--foolish fancies, dreams, desires, all beckoning
and bobbing to the old tune:


"Oh had I but loved with a boyish love,
It would have been well for me."


How does Bayly manage it? What is the trick of it, the obvious,
simple, meretricious trick, which somehow, after all, let us mock as
we will, Bayly could do, and we cannot? He really had a slim,
serviceable, smirking, and sighing little talent of his own; and--