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 the rhyme I don’t think you do it justice. You describe it as a rough, unstudied sailor’s jingle, whereas it is a work of art. Some of the lines are tremendous, and the whole poem has a haunting quality that never yet distinguished a mere jingle.”

But the Times was not convinced. It followed Mr. Mason’s letter with the following condescending editorial note:

Thereupon Mr. Champion I. Hitchcock, a close friend of Mr. Allison and his associate on the Insurance Field, took up the cudgels and wrote the Times a letter setting forth the history of the inception and development of the poem from the first three-stanza version published as a song in 1891, to the final six-stanza version published in the Rubric in 1901; and pointing out that, no matter how old a scrapbook might be, additions to it could be made at any time, and that this poem had certainly been