So Mitchell cooled off to Rice, and, in fact, his next poem was actually about Rice--not written to order, but for pure hate of Rice--and it was undoubtedly a bitter and powerful poem; but Rice, being far stronger than Mitchell, made him eat it and swallow it in front of his class, though it was written in red ink. And Mitchell said if he died, Rice would be hung. But he felt no ill effects, though he rather hoped he would.
At this season, however, a far greater and more splendid poem than any Mitchell could do had appeared in England. In fact, it was set to music and England rang with it--also Ireland. At least, so Rice said, because his mother had told him so in a letter. There was a special mention of Ireland in it, and Rice’s mother told him that it had made more recruits in Ireland than Mr. Redmond and Sir Edward Carson put together.
Rice never does anything by halves, and he actually learnt the poem by heart, and also found out the tune somehow and sang it when possible. Once, in fact, he woke up in the night singing it from force of habit, as the saying is, and his prefect, who happened to be Mactaggert, said there was a time for everything, and threatened to report Rice if he did it again.
I asked Rice why he had made such a great effort and learnt anything he wasn’t obliged to learn, and he said, firstly, because it was the grandest poem he had ever heard, and, secondly, because he had a great idea some day to sing it to Fortescue, as it applied specially to him by dwelling on the fearfulness of hanging back when the Empire cried out for you.
The poem said the Empire was calling to every one of her sons of low and high degree, and so, of course, it was also calling to Fortescue; and Rice thought that as it was pretty certain Fortescue wouldn’t read it, and, no doubt, fought shy of patriotic poetry in general just now, he meant to wait for some happy opportunity when Fortescue was not in a position to get out of earshot and sing it to him.
But the opportunity did not come, so Rice adopted the former plan of leaving the poem in Fortescue’s room. He had plenty of printed copies of the words, because the poem, after first appearing in a London newspaper of great renown, had been copied, at the special wish of the author, into hundreds and thousands of other papers; and to show you the tremendous liking people had for it, even the _Merivale Weekly Trumpet_ printed it and Milly Dunston found it there.