Chapter & Verse

John Mitchell requests the source and the rest (if any) of a ditty that begins...

John Mitchell requests the source and the rest (if any) of a ditty that begins "'Twas midnight on the ocean,/Not a streetcar was in sight./I went down to the corner store/To buy myself a light./ The man behind the counter/Was a woman old and gray/Who used to sell bananas/On the road to Mandalay."

Andrew Webster seeks the author's name and the rest of a poem that begins "No matter what happens to man/ The world is well made, though."

A. Shneur Horowitz wonders who described children as "that outlaw band."

Timothy Fleck hopes someone can provide the correct wording and a source for the assertion, "There are only three true arts: [?], [?], and pastry decoration. Architecture is a branch of pastry decoration."

June Skye Szirotny asks if anyone can provide an authoritative source for Richard Ellmann's assertion, in his 1973 essay "Dorothea's Husbands," that Beatrice Potter Webb referred to Herbert Spencer as Casaubon, the elderly scholar in George Eliot's Middlemarch.

"Truro" (January-February). Frank Kelly Jr. was first to identify "Memory of Cape Cod," from The Harp Weaver and Other Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay. The poem was read at the funeral mass of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

"hell-fire sunset" (January-February). Cathe Giffuni identified "Wild Wales," in Sylvia Townsend Warner's Scenes of Childhood and Other Stories, as the source.

Most popular

All That’s Unseen charts the Harvard graduate’s uneasy journey from Appalachia to Cambridge and back.  

In 1954, Gregory Corso moved into Eliot House. How he stayed there is a literary legend.

After a final round of layoffs, University leaders say 165 staff jobs were eliminated across the division.

Explore More From Current Issue

Smiling woman stands beside a large skull in a display cabinet.

From competing in youth gymnastics to studying tetrapods, the Harvard curator has always chased her curiosity.

Three young women posed side by side against red background.

The 2026-2027 Ledecky and Summer Undergraduate Fellows

A man in a suit speaks at a podium.

David Battat promotes alumni engagement.