"And say, git onto the cunnin' elbow sleeves our little playmate's sportin'."
"Yes, but goils, just pipe the poilies--ain't they the greatest ever?"
"They sure are. Say, kiddo, gimme one of 'em to remember you by, won't you? You'll never miss it--you got a-plenty more."
"Wot d'ye call wot he's got on 'um, anyway?" The speaker was a male, naturally.
"W'y, you big stoopid, can't you see he's wearin' rompers?" The answer came in a giggle, from a gay youthful creature of the opposite sex as she kicked out roguishly.
"Well, then be chee, w'y don't he romp a little?"
"Give 'um time, cancher? Don't you see he's blowin' out his flues? He's busy now. He'll romp in a minute."
A waggish young person in white beaded slippers and a green sport skirt broke free from the cavorting ring, and behind Mr. Leary's back the nimble fingers of the madcap tapped his spinal ornamentations as an instrumentalist taps the stops of an organ; and she chanted a familiar counting game of childhood:
"Rich man--poor man--beggar man--thief--doctor--loiryer----"
"Sure, he said he was a loiryer." It was Mr. Cassidy breaking in. "And he said his name was Algernon. Well, I believe the Algernon part--the big A. P. A."
"Algernon, does your mother know you're out?"
"T'ree cheers for Algy, the walkin' comic valentine!"
"Algy, Algy--Oh, you cutey Algy!" These jolly Greenwich Villagers were going to make a song of his name. They did make a song of it, and it was a frolicsome song and pitched to a rollicksome key. Congenial newcomers arrived, pelting down from upstairs whence they had been drawn by the happy rocketing clamour; and they caught spirit and step and tune with the rest and helped manfully to sing it. As one poet hath said, "And now reigned high carnival." And as another has so aptly phrased it, "There was sound of revelry by night." And, as the second poet once put it, or might have put it so if so be he didn't, "And all went merry as a marriage bell." But when we, adapting the line to our own descriptive usages, now say all went merry we should save out one exception--one whose form alternately was racked by hot flushes of a terrific self-consciousness and by humid gusts of an equally terrific sneezing fit.
