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Book, page 91 / 392 of hailstorm. Some of the lines that had stuck in her mind were very curious, though she had forgotten where they came from. One specially amusing piece of Eighteenth-Century satirical verse I have never been able to trace. Perhaps if I put it forth here I shall find out whence it comes--very likely from some perfectly obvious source. The lines which were used to calm us in our more grandiose and self-conceited moods ran as follows: Similes that never hit, Vivacity that is not wit, Schemes laid this hour, the next forsaken, Advice oft asked, but never taken. She had a couplet which she often produced when the newspapers came out with some big social scandal or the coming to financial grief of some great family name. On such occasions she would mutter to herself: Debts and duns And nothing for my younger sons. Another verse, though I quote it not the least to show her literary taste but because it was exceedingly characteristic of her, was in the spring-time always on her lips: The broom, the broom, the yellow broom, The ancient poets sung it, And sweet it is on summer days To lie at ease among it. I could fill a book, and perhaps some day I will do so, with Leaker's reflections on men and things, and her epigrammatic sayings, and still more with her wonderful old sea-stories, especially of the press-gang, which she could almost remember in operation. Her father was, as she always put it, "in the King's Navy," and he had been "bosun" to a ship's "cap'n." He was at the Mutiny of the Nore, but was not a mutineer. She was, however, full of stories about the Mutiny, which we found extremely exciting. She used to sing, or rather "croon" to us some of the mutineers' songs. One that I specially remember began with this verse:
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