If the angels had only restored him
    Without the additional years
  That had passed since the enemy bored him
    To death with their long, sharp spears.

  As it was, he bored her, and she rambled
    Away with her father’s young groom,
  And the old lover smiled as he ambled
    Contentedly back to the tomb.

SIRES AND SONS.

  Wild wanton Luxury lays waste the land
  With difficulty tilled by Thrift’s hard hand! 
  Then dies the State!—­and, in its carcass found,
  The millionaires, all maggot-like, abound. 
  Alas! was it for this that Warren died,
  And Arnold sold himself to t’ other side,
  Stark piled at Bennington his British dead,
  And Gates at Camden, Lee at Monmouth, fled?—­
  For this that Perry did the foeman fleece,
  And Hull surrender to preserve the peace? 
  Degenerate countrymen, renounce, I pray,
  The slothful ease, the luxury, the gay
  And gallant trappings of this idle life,
  And be more fit for one another’s wife.

A CHALLENGE.

  A bull imprisoned in a stall
  Broke boldly the confining wall,
  And found himself, when out of bounds,
  Within a washerwoman’s grounds. 
  Where, hanging on a line to dry,
  A crimson skirt inflamed his eye. 
  With bellowings that woke the dead,
  He bent his formidable head,
  With pointed horns and gnarly forehead;
  Then, planting firm his shoulders horrid,
  Began, with rage made half insane,
  To paw the arid earth amain,
  Flinging the dust upon his flanks
  In desolating clouds and banks,
  The while his eyes’ uneasy white
  Betrayed his doubt what foe the bright
  Red tent concealed, perchance, from sight. 
  The garment, which, all undismayed,
  Had never paled a single shade,
  Now found a tongue—­a dangling sock,
  Left carelessly inside the smock: 
  “I must insist, my gracious liege,
  That you’ll be pleased to raise the siege: 
  My colors I will never strike. 
  I know your sex—­you’re all alike. 
  Some small experience I’ve had—­
  You’re not the first I’ve driven mad.”

TWO SHOWS.

  The showman (blessing in a thousand shapes!)
  Parades a “School of Educated Apes!”
  Small education’s needed, I opine,
  Or native wit, to make a monkey shine;
  The brute exhibited has naught to do
  But ape the larger apes who come to view—­
  The hoodlum with his horrible grimace,
  Long upper lip and furtive, shuffling pace,
  Significant reminders of the time
  When hunters, not policemen, made him climb;
  The lady loafer with her draggling “trail,”
  That free translation of an ancient tail;
  The sand-lot quadrumane in hairy suit,
  Whose heels are thumbs perverted by the