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138 to set him to learn a particularly hard and uninteresting piece of poetry, beginning—

Dickie could not help thinking that the father and mother who were to be his in this beautiful world might have preferred something simple and more affectionate from their little boy than this difficult piece whose last verse was the only one which seemed to Dickie to mean anything in particular. In this verse Dickie was made to remark that he hoped people would say of him, "He died a good old man," which he did not hope, and indeed had never so much as thought of. The poetry, he decided, would have been nicer if it had been more about his father and mother and less about fame and trees and burdens. He felt this so much that he tried to write a poem himself, and got as far as—

But he could not think of any more to say, and besides, he had a haunting idea that the first two lines—which were quite the