Oh gentle heigho-let! (Or little sigh) On sweet urbanity, Though mere inanity, To touch their vanity We
will rely!
No, it's beyond this cricket's power to describe. I'll let the whale convey what images she may, for the task is beyond me.
Just like a cricket! He interrupts and chirps and chirps and drowns out even three whales singing! The three blues were warbling,
friends. It was Faunian's turn to wail a verse:
We'll charm their senses With verbal fences, With ballads amatory And declamatory. Little heeding Their
pretty pleading Our love exceeding We'll justify. Oh dainty triolet...
You all know the chorus: once more marchmates! Sing with me, come!
Oh fragrant violet! Oh gentle heigho-let! (Or little sigh) On sweet urbanity, Though mere inanity, To
touch their vanity We will rely!

Meanwhile in the Lagoon the female whales studied the classics: Sappo, Harriet Beachstone, Forge Sand, Ginger Wolf, Treadna
Sea Incident M'Lay, Seadeath Wharfton... But even more than study whales love to sing. The females too would yodel
and chant, but their lyrics all had to do with the baseness of the bull whale:
Bull will swear and bull will storm - Bull is not at all good form Bull is no kind of use - Bull's a
donkey - Bull's a goose - Bull is course and Bull is plain - Bull is more or less insane - Bull's a ribald
- Bull's a rake - Bull is Nature's sole mistake!
But now the three bulls - Hilaryous, Kriryl and Faunian - had reached Lagoon Obdurate and slipped inside without a sound.
They were not at all observed, for the females - all one hundred whales - were clustered around Princess Hydra. She
was furious! Princess Hydra expelled Sackabrine and Floe. Just marooned them forever and would listen to no entreaty, no appeal.
Sackabrine had dared to tell the collegians the story of the Minoboar, the Bull of Creet.

And Floe was caught reading the story of Turdinhand the Bull.

|