_A Legend of the Hive_ (Vol. ix., p. 167.).--With every feeling of
gratitude to EIRIONNACH, I cannot receive praise for false metre and
erroneous grammar. In the fifth line of the first stanza of the quoted
verse, the first of the above legend, "are" is redundant: and in the first
line of the next stanza, "bore" should be "bare." I remember that in more
cases than one the printer of my published rhymes has perpetrated this
latter mistake.
Suffer me to reply to a question of the same courteous critic EIRIONNACH,
in Vol. ix., p. 162., about a "Christ-cross-row." This name for the
alphabet obtained in the good old Cornish dame-schools when I was a boy. In
a book that I have seen, there is a vignette of a monk teaching a little
boy to read, and beneath
"_A Christ-Cross Rhyme._