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We now come to the winter evening, and the pencil and paper.

It is a delightful feature of our modern civilization that books are very cheap, and that the poets are read by everybody. That would be a very barren house where one did not find Scott, Byron, Goldsmith, Longfellow, Tennyson, Browning, Bret Harte, and Jean Ingelow. Very few boys and girls can reach the age of sixteen without having committed to memory some immortal poem of one of these most popular poets.

Therefore there would be no embarrassment if we asked the members of any evening circle to write down three or four lines in the measure of “Evangeline,” “Lady Clara Vere de Vere,” “The Corsair,” “The Traveler,” “Marmion,” or “Hervé Riel,” “The Heathen Chinee,” or the pretty “Bird Song” of Jean Ingelow. Not a parody only, however, but a parody involving a certain idea or word.

In the great year of Coggia’s comet this game was thus played, and a young man was requested to speak of the comet in the style of “Mother Goose.” The result was as follows: