The Pie of Life.

The Old Lad is a cornucopia of rambling retrospect. His sense of humour has never become muscle-bound through over-exertion in the exercise of earnestness. His opinion of life might be expressed in the following lines:—

Life is a layer of pie-crust,
A sticky confection of dough,
Compounded of stodgy components,
Concealing what few of us know.
Some are content to admire it,
To take it for granted in fact,
To these it's a grave sort of matter,
Impressive and dully compact,
But others with puckish perverseness,
Consider it stodgy and dull,
They crave to investigate further—
A vessel is more than a hull—
They puncture the pie-crust with vigour,
And excavate deeply and wide,
The surface is large and impressive,
But what of the sweet-meats inside,
The morsels and tit-bits of humour,
Without which no pie is worth while?
They prise up the crust and—hi presto!
Discover beneath it A Smile.
We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

—Shakespeare.

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