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The lengthy discussion
That sensitive Russian
Compiled on the U. S. A.
Was read by the maid,
As she carelessly played
With her beautiful hair one day.
“The talk you hear in that primitive land,”
He wrote, “nobody can understand.”
“Somebody who guffed him,”
She said, “has stuffed him,
And easily bluffed him
To beat the band!”
[80]The Moral: The people across the brine
Are exceedingly strong on Auld Lang Syne,
But they’re lost in the push when they strike a gang
That is strong on American new line slang!
![SLANG]()
a Dragon Released![]()
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[81]How Thomas a Maid froma Dragon Released
Though Philip the Second
Of France was reckoned
No coward, his breath came short
When they told him a dragon
As big as a wagon
Was waiting below in the court!
A dragon so long, and so wide, and so fat,
That he couldn’t get in at the door to chat:
The king couldn’t leave him
Outside and grieve him,
He had to receive him
Upon the mat,
![]()
[82]The dragon bowed nicely,
And very concisely
He stated the reason he’d called:
He made the disclosure
With frigid composure.
King Philip was simply appalled!
He demanded for eating, a fortnight apart,
The monarch’s ten daughters, all dear to his heart.
“And now you’ll produce,” he
Concluded, “the juicy
And succulent Lucie
By way of start!”
King Philip was pliant,
And far from defiant
—“And servile,” no doubt you retort!—
But if you struck a snag on
A bottle-green dragon,
Who filled up two-thirds of your court,
And curled up his tail on your new tin roof,
And made your piazza groan under his hoof,
Would you threaten and thunder,
Or just knuckle under
Completely, I wonder,
If put to proof?
[83] ![]()
By way of a truce, he
Brought out little Lucie
And watched her conducted away,
But all of the others
Were out with their brothers!
Thus gaining a little delay,
He promised through heralds sent west and east,
His crown, and his kingdom, and last, not least,
His daughter so sightly
To any one knightly
Who’d come and politely
Wipe out that beast!
[84]For love of the charmer,
Arrayed in his armor,
Each suitor for glory who yearned,
Would gallantly hasten,
The dragon to chasten,
But none of them ever returned!
When the dragon had eaten some sixteen score
He hung up this sign on his cavern door,
Whereat he lay pronely
In majesty lonely:
There’s Standing Room Only
For Three Knights More!
A slim adolescent,
His beard only crescent,
Rode up at this stage of the game
To where the old sinner
Lay gorged with his dinner,
And breathing out torrents of flame.
He gathered a tip from the flaunting sign,
And took his position the fourth in line,
Until, as foreboded,
By food incommoded,
The dragon exploded
At half-past nine.
[85] ![]()
This shows how a servant may laugh at the Fates,
Since everything comes to the fellow who waits.[86]
[87] The king was delighted
At first when he sighted
The victor, but then in dismay
Regretted his promise.
The stripling was Thomas,
His Majesty’s valet-de-pied!
He asked him at once: “Will you compromise?”
But Thomas looked straight in his master’s eyes,
And answered severely:
“I see your game clearly,
And scorn it sincerely.
Hand out the prize!”
Not long did he linger
Before on the finger
Of Lucie he fitted a ring:
A month or two later
They made him dictator,
In place of the elderly king:
He was lauded by pulpit, and boomed by press,
And no one had ever a chance to guess,
Beholding this hero
Who ruled like a Nero,
His valor was zero,
Or something less.
The Moral: And still from Nice to Calais
Discretion’s the better part of—
[88]—valets!
and Her Suitor was Suited![]()
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[89]How a Beauty was Wakedand Her Suitor was Suited
Albeit wholly penniless,
Prince Charming wasn’t any less
Conceited than a Croesus or a modern millionaire:
Though often in necessity,
No one would ever guess it. He
Was candidly insolvent, and he frankly didn’t care!
Of the many debts he made
Not a one was ever paid,
But no one ever pressed him to refund the borrowed gold:
While he recklessly kept spending,
People gladly kept on lending,
For the fact they knew a title
Was requital
Twenty-fold!
(He lived in sixteen sixty-three,
This smooth unblushing article,
Since when, as far as I can see,
Men haven’t changed a particle!)
[90]In Charming’s principality
There was a wild locality,
Composed of sombre forest, and of steep and frowning crags,
Of pheasant and of rabbit, too;
And here it was his habit to
Go hunting with his courtiers in the keen pursuit of stags.
But the charger that he rode
So mercurially strode
That the prince on one occasion left the others in the lurch,
And the falling darkness found him,
With no vassals left around him,
Near a building like an abbey,
Or a shabby
Ruined church.
His Highness said: “I’ll ring the bell
And stay till morning in it!” (He
Took Hobson’s choice, for no hotel
There was in the vicinity.)
[91]His ringing was so vehement
That any one could see he meant
To suffer no refusal, but, in spite of all the din,
There was no answer audible,
And so, with courage laudable,
His Royal Highness turned the knob, and stoutly entered in.
Then he strode across the court,
But he suddenly stopped short
When he passed within the castle by a massive oaken door:
There were courtiers without number,
But they all were plunged in slumber,
The prince’s ear delighting
By uniting
In a snore.
The prince remarked: “This must be Philadelphia, Pennsylvania!”
(And so was born the jest that’s still
The comic journal’s mania!)
![]()
This shows how the prince won the princess’s heart,
And the end of her sleeping was simply a start.
[92]With torpor reprehensible,
Numb, comatose, insensible,
The flunkeys and the chamberlains all slumbered like the dead,
And snored so loud and mournfully,
That Charming passed them scornfully
And came to where a princess lay asleep upon a bed.
She was so extremely fair
That His Highness didn’t care
For the risk, and so he kissed her ere a single word he spoke:—
In a jiffy maids and pages,
Ushers, lackeys, squires, and sages,
As fresh as if they’d been at least
A week awake,[93]
[94] ![]()
Awoke,
And hastened, bustled, dashed and ran
Up stairways and through galleries:
In brief, they one and all began
Again to earn their salaries!
[95] ![]()
[96]Aroused from her paralysis,
As if in deep analysis
Of him who had awakened her, the princess met his eye:
Her glance at first was critical,
And sternly analytical.
And then she dropped her lashes and she gave a little sigh.
As he watched her, wholly dumb,
She observed: “You doubtless come
For one of two good reasons, and I’m going to ask you which.
Do you mean my house to harry, Or do you propose to marry?”
He answered: “I may rue it,
But I’ll do it,
If you’re rich!”
The princess murmured with a smile:
“I’ve millions, at the least, to come!”
The prince cried: “Please excuse me, while
I go and get the priest to come!”
The Moral: When affairs go ill
The sleeping partner foots the bill.
May go Back on a Chap![]()
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[97]How Jack Found that BeansMay go Back on a Chap
Without the slightest basis
For hypochondriasis
A widow had forebodings which a cloud around her flung,
And with expression cynical
For half the day a clinical
Thermometer she held beneath her tongue.
Whene’er she read the papers
She suffered from the vapors,
At every tale of malady or accident she’d groan;
In every new and smart disease,
From housemaid’s knee to heart disease,
She recognized the symptoms as her own!
She had a yearning chronic
To try each novel tonic,
Elixir, panacea, lotion, opiate, and balm;
And from a homœopathist
Would change to an hydropathist,
And back again, with stupefying calm!
[98] ![]()
The closets of her villa
Were full of sarsaparilla,
Ammonia, digitalis, bronchial troches, soda mint.
Restoratives hirsutical,
And soaps to clean the cuticle,
And iodine, and peptonoids, and lint.
She was nervous, cataleptic,
And anemic, and dyspeptic:
Though not convinced of apoplexy, yet she had her fears.
She dwelt with force fanatical
Upon a twinge rheumatical,
And said she had a buzzing in her ears!
[99]Now all of this bemoaning And this grumbling and this groaning
The mind of Jack, her son and heir, unconscionably bored.
His heart completely hardening, He gave his time to gardening,
For raising beans was something he adored.
![]()
[100] Each hour in accents morbid
This limp maternal bore bid
Her callous son affectionate and lachrymose good-bys.
She never granted Jack a day
Without some long “Alackaday!”
Accompanied by rolling of the eyes.
But Jack, no panic showing,
Just watched his beanstalk growing,
And twined with tender fingers the tendrils up the pole.
At all her words funereal
He smiled a smile ethereal,
Or sighed an absent-minded “Bless my soul!”
[101]That hollow-hearted creature
Would never change a feature:
No tear bedimmed his eye, however touching was her talk.
She never fussed or flurried him,
The only thing that worried him
Was when no bean-pods grew upon the stalk!
But then he wabbled loosely His head, and wept profusely,
And, taking out his handkerchief to mop away his tears,
Exclaimed: “It hasn’t got any!”
He found this blow to botany
Was sadder than were all his mother’s fears.
[102]The Moral is that gardeners pine
Whene’er no pods adorn the vine.
Of all sad words experience gleans
The saddest are: “It might have beans.”
(I did not make this up myself:
’Twas in a book upon my shelf.
It’s witty, but I don’t deny
It’s rather Whittier than I!)
![It might have beans!]()
a Poet Was Booted![]()
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[103]How a Cat Was Annoyed anda Poet Was Booted
A poet had a cat.
There is nothing odd in that—
(I might make a little pun about the Mews!)
But what is really more
Remarkable, she wore
A pair of pointed patent-leather shoes.
And I doubt me greatly whether
E’er you heard the like of that:
Pointed shoes of patent-leather
On a cat!
![]()
His time he used to pass
Writing sonnets, on the grass—
(I might say something good on pen and sward!)
While the cat sat near at hand,
Trying hard to understand
The poems he occasionally roared.
(I myself possess a feline,
But when poetry I roar
He is sure to make a bee-line
For the door.)
[104]The poet, cent by cent,
All his patrimony spent—
(I might tell how he went from werse to werse!)
Till the cat was sure she could,
By advising, do him good
So addressed him in a manner that was terse:
“We are bound toward the scuppers,
And the time has come to act,
Or we’ll both be on our uppers
For a fact!”
On her boot she fixed her eye,
But the boot made no
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