His eyelids mucilaginously sealed,
  His fertile head by scissors made to yield
  Abundant harvestage of ears, his pelt,
  In every wrinkle and on every welt,
  Quickset with pencil-points from feet to gills
  And thickly studded with a pride of quills,
  The royal Jester in the dreadful strife
  Was made (in short) an editor for life!

  An idle tale, and yet a moral lurks
  In this as plainly as in greater works. 
  I shall not give it birth:  one moral here
  Would die of loneliness within a year.

A CAREER IN LETTERS.

  When Liberverm resigned the chair
  Of This or That in college, where
  For two decades he’d gorged his brain
  With more than it could well contain,
  In order to relieve the stress
  He took to writing for the press. 
  Then Pondronummus said, “I’ll help
  This mine of talent to devel’p;”
  And straightway bought with coin and credit
  The Thundergust for him to edit.

  The great man seized the pen and ink
  And wrote so hard he couldn’t think;
  Ideas grew beneath his fist
  And flew like falcons from his wrist. 
  His pen shot sparks all kinds of ways
  Till all the rivers were ablaze,
  And where the coruscations fell
  Men uttered words I dare not spell.

  Eftsoons with corrugated brow,
  Wet towels bound about his pow,
  Locked legs and failing appetite,
  He thought so hard he couldn’t write. 
  His soaring fancies, chickenwise,
  Came home to roost and wouldn’t rise. 
  With dimmer light and milder heat
  His goose-quill staggered o’er the sheet,
  Then dragged, then stopped; the finish came—­
  He couldn’t even write his name. 
  The Thundergust in three short weeks
  Had risen, roared, and split its cheeks. 
  Said Pondronummus, “How unjust! 
  The storm I raised has laid my dust!”

  When, Moneybagger, you have aught
  Invested in a vein of thought,
  Be sure you’ve purchased not, instead,
  That salted claim, a bookworm’s head.

THE FOLLOWING PAIR.

  O very remarkable mortal,
    What food is engaging your jaws
  And staining with amber their portal? 
      “It’s ’baccy I chaws.”

  And why do you sway in your walking,
    To right and left many degrees,
  And hitch up your trousers when talking? 
      “I follers the seas.”

  Great indolent shark in the rollers,
    Is “’baccy,” too, one of your faults?—­
  You, too, display maculate molars. 
      “I dines upon salts.”

  Strange diet!—­intestinal pain it
    Is commonly given to nip. 
  And how can you ever obtain it? 
      “I follers the ship.”

POLITICAL ECONOMY.