"
"Oh messire", said the lady, "I weep because it is this evening
that I am to entertain the ladies of our Progress Literary Club,
and Donna Margarita whom men call the Spanish Omelet, but who
really, messire, has a lovely voice, was going to sing 'The
Rosary' and now she has a cold and cannot sing, and King
Ferdinand is coming, and oh, messire, what", said the lady,
"shall I do?"
"Why now, truly", said Colombo, "in Genoa it was the judgment of
all the really musically intelligent ladies, except perhaps my
wife, that I sang not an unpleasing baritone, and while I do not
know the song to which you refer, yet I have devoted most of my
life to the composition of a poem concerning the land of my
imagining which might well be sung and besides that", said
Colombo, "I can do a most remarkable egg trick."
So it was that Colombo became for a short time not undeservedly
the life of the Progress Literary Club party. And the tale tells
how, after a paper by Donna Violet Balboa on "Spanish
Architecture--Then and Now", Colombo sang to them the song of the
land of Colombo's imagining. And poignantly beautiful was the
song, for in it was the beauty of a poet's dream, and the eternal
loveliness of that vision which men have glimpsed in all ages if
ever so faintly.
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