[Illustration:  The Lazy Laureate of the Thames.]

  Who would not be a Minstrel Lazy? 
      A trifle crazy,
    The best of them!  Ah! 
  Here’s ASHBY STERRY, in punt or wherry,
  He’s ever merry! sing “hey down derry,”
      Or anything very
    Like Tra! la! la! la!

  On sunny days he trolls his lays
  With gay guitar and Tra! la! la! la! 
  From groves and glades come meadow-sweet maids,
  None of your saucy minxes or jades;
      The poet is there
      Without a care. 
  With no regret, with mild cigarette. 
  With gay guitar, and whiskey from Leith,
  Will he be crowned with the Laureate wreath?

(The Nymph Pantalettina is heard singing.)

    Come where my ASHBY lies dreaming,
      Dreaming for hours after lunch. 
    Softly! for he is scheming
      Poems for Mister Punch! 
    Graceful is his position—­
      Hark! how he sweeps the strings,
    While of his Eighth Edition
      The Warbler STERRY sings:—­

(The Bard chirpeth his roundelay.)

  “On ‘Spring’s Delights’ in ‘Hambledon Lock’
    ‘My Country Cousin’ may hap—­
      With her I’ll go
      ‘In Rotten Row,’
      Stop on an ’oss
      ‘At Charing-Cross,’
    For a ‘Tam O’Shanter Cap.’

  No gout?  Oh no!  But I’m ‘Taken in Tow,’
    And suffering from dejection,
  ‘Spring Cleaning’ I’ll use for a pair of old shoes
    (Queer rhyme upon reflection),
  ‘Sound without Sense,’ I’ve no pretence,
    To write Shakspearian Sonnets. 
      Of her and him,
      As suits my whim,
  I sing, and I hymn her bonnets!”

(Chorus of Pantalettina and River Nymphs.)

      So, hail to the Bard so merry,
      To Lazy Laureate STERRY! 
  He’ll sing of a Lock on the Thames! oh rare! 
    Or hymn a Lock of his Lady’s hair.

* * * * *

CONVERSATIONAL HINTS FOR YOUNG SHOOTERS.

The subject of Lunch, my dear young friends, has now been exhausted.  We have done, for the time, with poetry, and descend again to the ordinary prose of every-day shooting.  Yet stay—­before we proceed further, there is one matter apart from the mere details of sport, which may be profitably considered in this treatise.  It is the divine, the delightful subject of

SMOKING.

First, I ask, do you know—­(1), the man who never smokes from the night of the 11th of August up to the night of the 1st of February in the following year, for fear of injuring his sight and his shooting nerve? (2), the host who forbids all smoking amongst the guests assembled at his house for a shooting-party?

You, naturally enough, reply that you have not the honour of being acquainted with these severe, but enthusiastic gentlemen.  Nobody does know them.  They don’t exist.  But it is very useful to affect a sort of second-hand knowledge of these Gorgons of the weed, as thus:—­