Explore "A Game of Fives" by Lewis Carroll on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
/ FIVE little girls, of Five, Four, Three, Two, One: / Rolling on the hearthrug, full of tricks and fun.
/ Five rosy girls, in years from Ten to Six: / Sitting down to lessons-no more time for tricks.
/ Five growing girls, from Fifteen to Eleven: / Music, Drawing, Languages, and food enough for seven!
/ Five winsome girls, from Twenty to Sixteen: / Each young man that calls, I say "Now tell me which you _mean_!"
/ Five dashing girls, the youngest Twenty-one: / But, if nobody proposes, what is there to be done?
/ Five showy girls-but Thirty is an age / When girls may be _engaging_, but they somehow don't _engage_.
/ Five dressy girls, of Thirty-one or more: / So gracious to the shy young men they snubbed so much before!
/ Five _passé_ girls-Their age? Well, never mind! / We jog along together, like the rest of human kind: / But the quondam "careless bachelor" begins to think he knows / The answer to that ancient problem "how the money goes"!