Page:The plastic age, (IA plasticage00mark).pdf/117

Rh poems are about. Hell! how some of the boys are going to fox ’em.” He paused to laugh. “Jim Hicks told me this afternoon that ‘Philomela’ was by Shakspere.” The other boys did not under¬ stand the joke, but they all laughed heartily.

“Now,” he went on, “I ’ll give you the name of a poem, and then you tell me what it’s about and who wrote it.”

He leafed rapidly through an anthology. “Carl, who wrote ‘Kubla Khan’?”

Carl puffed his pipe meditatively. “I’m going to fox you, Pudge,” he said, frankly triumphant; “I know. Coleridge wrote it. It seems to be about a Jew who built a swell joint for a wild woman or something like that. I can’t make much out of the damn thing.”

“That’s enough. Smack for Carl,” said Pudge approvingly. “Smack” meant that the answer was satisfactory. '“Freddy, who wrote ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’?”

Freddy twisted in his chair, thumped his head with his knuckles, and finally announced with a groan of despair, “No soap.”

“Hugh?”

“No soap.”

“Larry?”

“Well,” drawled Larry, “I think Jawn Keats wrote it. It’s one of those bedtime stories with a kick. A knight gets picked up by a jane. He