It was called “The Queen’s Choir,” and the poem to which he first applied himself was in the middle of the book: “A Fiction: How Cupid made a Nymph wound herself with his Arrows.” In the last stanza, there was a couplet that read:
Though mountains meet not, lovers may;
So others do, and so do they.
And the first line of the couplet was heavily underscored.
Babbing regarded that line with satisfaction before he went back to the blank fly leaves and began to examine page after page with leisurely particularity. “Have you ever heard of the Catskills?”
“Yes, sir.”
He passed several pages before he asked: “What are they?”
Barney looked out the window as if he expected to see them floating down the Hudson on a Haverstraw brick barge. “I don’ know,” he replied, at last. “I forget.”
