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Rh mation, he is obliged to relinquish to the gnome his last penny. The White Doe maintaining throughout the image of a creature springing this way and that across a narrow forest stream, A Capful of Moonshine with its theme of the man who wished to know 'how one gets to see a fairy," The Gentle Cockatrice monumentally patient despite a recurring desire to identify its tail, and The Man Who Killed the Cuckoo, are tales one does not forget. This Mr Badman's progress, told with a laconic wonder and embodying newly as it does, the moral contained in the story of Midas, is an account of a man who "lived in a small house with a large garden" and "took no man's advice about anything." Finding that the poisonous voice that he had disliked at a distance proceeded from himself, he "felt his eyes turning inwards, so that he could see into the middle of his body. And there sat the cuckoo." We find him eventually "sailing along under the stars," tied into a bed of cuckoo feathers, "complete and compact; and inside him was the feeling of a great windmill going round and round and round."

One must not monopolize; one need not avenge oneself; in improving the morals of the world, one should begin by improving one's own; these are the mordant preoccupations about which Mr Housman's fancy plays.