Well, _Aran_, who is very far from being a domestic character, is struck down by avenging lightning at the destruction of the Tower of Babel, and _Noema_ is left a widow, with her child, who has been protected in the _mêlée_ by the Spirit _Afrael's_ taking him out of it, and restoring him to his mother's arms. When, after this, the infatuated spirit-lover _Afrael_ requests _Noema_ to say the word which shall make a man of him, and a husband of him too at the same time, she modestly refuses, until she has had a decent time to order her widow's weeds at her milliner's and wear them for about a month or so, at the expiration of which interval _Afrael_ may, if he be still of the same mind, call in again, and pop the question.
_Afrael_ bids good-bye to the Upper House, and, his heart being ever true to _Poll_--meaning _Noema_--he returns, makes an evening call upon her, and asks her, in effect, "Is it to be '_Yes-ema_,' or '_No-ema_'?" The bashful widow chooses the former, and the Spirit-lover _Afrael_, renouncing his immortality, i.e., giving up spirits, becomes plain _Mr. Afrael_, and an ordinary, as far as anybody can judge, a very ordinary mortal, showing what a change a drop of spirits can effect in a constitution. Now I should like the poem "continued in our next." I should like to hear _how_ they got on together: and, as longevity was considerable in those patriarchal days, I should like to know how they got on together when _Afrael Esquire_ was 195, and his wife, _Noema_, was 200. Did _Afrael_ never again take to his spirits? Or, did he become miserable and hipped having entirely lost his spirits? Did his wife never make sarcastic reference to the "stars" with whom he had formerly been acquainted? And how about her boy, his step-son? Did they have any family? Whence came the money?
Perhaps Mr. ALFRED AUSTIN (whose works are being printed by MACMILLAN in a collected form, and among them _The Satire_ now historic) will give us an entirely new volume on the same subject, telling an expectant public all about _Mr._ and _Mrs. Afrael chez eux_, and, in fact, something spicy about this strangely assorted couple; for Poet ALFRED will do well to remember and act upon his own dictum when, in the preface to _The Satire_, he observed, and with truth, that had he originally "written with the grave decorum of a secluded moralist, he would" by this time "have gone down into the limbo of forgotten bores."