’T was the very house, the garden,
    Where their honeymoon was passed: 
  ’T was the place where Mrs. Arden
    Would have mourned him to the last.

  Ah, what grief she’d known without him! 
    Now what tears of joy she shed! 
  Enoch Arden looked about him: 
    “Shanghaied!”—­that was all he said.

DISAVOWAL.

  Two bodies are lying in Phoenix Park,
  Grim and bloody and stiff and stark,
  And a Land League man with averted eye
  Crosses himself as he hurries by. 
  And he says to his conscience under his breath: 
  “I have had no hand in this deed of death!”

  A Fenian, making a circuit wide
  And passing them by on the other side,
  Shudders and crosses himself and cries: 
  “Who says that I did it, he lies, he lies!”

  Gingerly stepping across the gore,
  Pat Satan comes after the two before,
  Makes, in a solemnly comical way,
  The sign of the cross and is heard to say: 
  “O dear, what a terrible sight to see,
  For babes like them and a saint like me!”

  1882.

AN AVERAGE.

  I ne’er could be entirely fond
  Of any maiden who’s a blonde,
  And no brunette that e’er I saw
  Had charms my heart’s whole
     warmth to draw.

  Yet sure no girl was ever made
  Just half of light and half of shade. 
  And so, this happy mean to get,
  I love a blonde and a brunette.

  WOMAN.

  Study good women and ignore the rest,
  For he best knows the sex who knows the best.

INCURABLE.

  From pride, joy, hate, greed, melancholy—­
  From any kind of vice, or folly,
  Bias, propensity or passion
  That is in prevalence and fashion,
  Save one, the sufferer or lover
  May, by the grace of God, recover: 
  Alone that spiritual tetter,
  The zeal to make creation better,
  Glows still immedicably warmer. 
  Who knows of a reformed reformer?

THE PUN.

  Hail, peerless Pun! thou last and best,
  Most rare and excellent bequest
  Of dying idiot to the wit
  He died of, rat-like, in a pit!

  Thyself disguised, in many a way
  Thou let’st thy sudden splendor play,
  Adorning all where’er it turns,
  As the revealing bull’s-eye burns,
  Of the dim thief, and plays its trick
  Upon the lock he means to pick.

  Yet sometimes, too, thou dost appear
  As boldly as a brigadier
  Tricked out with marks and signs, all o’er,
  Of rank, brigade, division, corps,
  To show by every means he can
  An officer is not a man;
  Or naked, with a lordly swagger,
  Proud as a cur without a wagger,
  Who says:  “See simple worth prevail—­
  All dog, sir—­not a bit of tail!”