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 portly, too, he might easily have passed muster as an army officer, while as judge of the supreme court, he would have made a highly creditable appearance. But as a poet? No. Not by the last stretch of imagination could he have been dressed or drilled or dragged into the remotest semblance of a poet. As he sat there, idly drifting up the creek, and looking rather cumbersome in his little boat, which he maintained was "just a fit," he held between his teeth a small brierwood pipe. The pipe had gone out, but it was evidently at home in the situation.

There was another thing about Uncle Bobby. He had never in his life written a line of poetry, nor did he often read any. If he had done so, he would probably have admired the wrong things, things wherein sentiment predominated over imagination, things about old blind organ-grinders or broken-hearted maidens, or possibly the story of some faithful dog, starving to death on his master's grave. He had no taste, for instance, for descriptions of natural scenery with moral reflections thrownin. Especially poems descriptive of the sea failed to interest him. His friends would sometimes enclose in their letters cuttings from the "Poet's Corner," in which the English language was exhausted in the well-meaning effort to conjure up a vision of the sea to the reader's mind. Uncle Bobby politely admitted that the description was somewhat like the ocean, but then, the ocean was not one bit like the descrip-