"How does it go?"
"Io aveva, I had, tu avevi, thou hadst, egli aveva, he had, noi av—"
"Wait—we've just had the hads. What are you giving me?"
"But this is another breed."
"What do we want of another breed? Isn't one breed enough? Had is had, and your tricking it out in a fresh way of spelling isn't going to make it any hadder than it was before; now you know that yourself."
"But there is a distinction—they are not just the same Hads."
"How do you make it out?"
"Well, you use that first Had when you are referring to something that happened at a named and sharp and perfectly definite moment; you use the other when the thing happened at a vaguely defined time and in a more prolonged and indefinitely continuous way."
"Why, doctor, it is pure nonsense; you know it yourself. Look here: If I have had a had, or have wanted to have had a had, or was in a position right then and there to have had a had that hadn't had any chance to go out hadding on account of this foolish discrimination which lets one Had go hadding in any kind of indefinite grammatical weather but restricts the other one to definite and datable meteoric convulsions, and keeps it pining around and watching the barometer all the time, and liable to get sick through confinement and lack of exercise, and all that sort of thing, why—why, the inhumanity of it is enough, let alone the wanton superfluity and uselessness of any such a loafing consumptive hospital-bird of a Had taking up room and cumbering the place for nothing. These finical refinements revolt me; it is not right, it is not honorable; it is constructive nepotism to keep in office a Had that is so delicate it can't come out when the wind's in the nor'west—I won't have this dude on the pay-roll. Cancel his exequatur; and look here—"
"But you miss the point. It is like this. You see—"
"Never mind explaining, I don't care anything about it. Six Hads is enough for me; anybody that needs twelve, let him subscribe; I don't want any stock in a Had Trust. Knock out the Prolonged and Indefinitely Continuous; four-fifths of it is water, anyway."
"But I beg you, podere! It is often quite indispensable in cases where—"
"Pipe the next squad to the assault!"
But it was not to be; for at that moment the dull boom of the noon gun floated up out of far-off Florence, followed by the usual softened jangle of church-bells, Florentine and suburban, that bursts out in murmurous response; by labor-union law the colazione[1] must stop; stop promptly, stop instantly, stop definitely, like the chosen and best of the breed of Hads.
THEY used to wait the favor of our eyes,
Shining and lovely things.
We heeded not if birds or butterflies;—
What mirth of silver wings
Should long outlive the stifling, clamorous day?
Lo, one in singing robes with lifted hands;
And circling into view
Above her head, soft-moving, white-winged bands.
Singer! from out the blue,
Woo back to us our vanished Dreams, we pray.
- ↑ Colazione is Italian for a collection, a meeting, a séance, a sitting.—M. T.
