THE WOULDBEGOODS
"And enjoying it too," Dicky said.
"It's very curious,"Denny said, "but you don't seem to be able to be certain inside yourself whether what you're doing is right if you happen to like doing it, but if you don't like doing it you know quite well. I only thought of that just now. I wish Noël would make a poem about it."
"I am," Noel said; "it began about a crocodile, but it is finishing itself up quite different from what I meant it to at first. Just wait a minute."
He wrote very hard while his kind brothers and sisters and his little friends waited the minute he had said, and then he read:
"The crocodile is very wise,
He lives in the Nile with little eyes.
He eats the hippopotamus too,
And if he could he would eat up you.
"The lovely woods and starry skies
He looks upon with glad surprise;
He sees the riches of the east.
And the tiger and lion, kings of beast.
"So let all be good and beware
Of saying sha'n't and won't and don't care;
For doing wrong is easier far
Than any of the right things I know about are.
And I couldn't make it king of beasts because of it not rhyming with east, so I put the s off beasts on to king. It comes even in the end."
We all said it was a very nice piece of poetry. Noël gets really ill if you don't like what he writes, and then he said, "If it's trying that's wanted, I don't care how hard we try to be good, but we
246
