Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: newspapers, and breathless poets, with pens behind their ears, watched the postman each time he came down the street, expecting him to stop and drop a royal command into the letter-box. Their Majesties, however, waited a long time, and were growing quite tired, till one morning the King looked up from the paper he was reading at breakfast, and said:
This one will do. He has found out a rhyme to Boohoo. Thus they appointed him, and at once, wishing to show what a good choice they had made, he wrote an ode to a policeman who had kicked a magistrate. Of course, the constable was laid hold of by the law, but they could not arrest the poet, since he was licenced?like any other victualler. Well, one day the Prince asked him what word it was that rhymed with his own name, and the Laureate, who felt himself obliged to be civil under the circumstances, replied,
Zoo;
adding, in words which he probably did not intend to be overheard, you royal goose. Boohoo felt that he had a right to be offended, for this was prose, not poetry, such as he had expected, but he so nearly choked himself atdessert while crying for leave to go there, that at last the Queen gave her consent. ‘He wrote an ode to a policeman.
Never mind, my dear, said the King. This is Tuesday; we will promise that he shall goon Friday. Meanwhile I will give directions for all the beasts to be put into the Lethal Chamber at Battersea, and so when he goes he will come to no harm.
The butler had been listening. Then he rang his bell for the Minister of the Interior, gave his orders, took a pinch of snuff, and finished his dinner. The butler, however, who had been listening, and whose sister had married a keeper at the Gardens, took a hansom directly the King had done, and drove off f…
