Well, well, we can’t do business,
I suspect:
A woman has no head for useful
tricks.
My profitable offers you reject
And will not promise anything
to fix
The opposition. That’s
not politics.
Good morning. Stay—I’m
chaffing you, conceitedly.
Madam, I mean to vote for you—repeatedly.
TO AN ASPIRANT.
What! you a Senator—you, Mike
de Young?
Still reeking of the gutter whence you
sprung?
Sir, if all Senators were such as you,
Their hands so crimson and so slender,
too,—
(Shaped to the pocket for commercial work,
For literary, fitted to the dirk)—
So black their hearts, so lily-white their
livers,
The toga’s touch would give a man
the shivers.
A BALLAD OF PIKEVILLE.
Down in Southern Arizona where the Gila
monster thrives,
And the “Mescalero,” gifted
with a hundred thousand lives,
Every hour renounces one of them by drinking
liquid flame—
The assassinating wassail that has given
him his name;
Where the enterprising dealer in Caucasian
hair is seen
To hold his harvest festival upon his
village-green,
While the late lamented tenderfoot upon
the plain is spread
With a sanguinary circle on the summit
of his head;
Where the cactuses (or cacti) lift their
lances in the sun,
And incautious jackass-rabbits come to
sorrow as they run,
Lived a colony of settlers—old
Missouri was the State
Where they formerly resided at a prehistoric
date.
Now, the spot that had been chosen for
this colonizing scheme
Was as waterless, believe me, as an Arizona
stream.
The soil was naught but ashes, by the
breezes driven free,
And an acre and a quarter were required
to sprout a pea.
So agriculture languished, for the land
would not produce,
And for lack of water, whisky was the
beverage in use—
Costly whisky, hauled in wagons many a
weary, weary day,
Mostly needed by the drivers to sustain
them on their way.
Wicked whisky! King of Evils!
Why, O, why did God create
Such a curse and thrust it on us in our
inoffensive state?
Once a parson came among them, and a holy
man was he;
With his ailing stomach whisky wouldn’t
anywise agree;
So he knelt upon the mesa and he
prayed with all his chin
That the Lord would send them water or
incline their hearts to gin.
Scarcely was the prayer concluded ere
an earthquake shook the land,
And with copious effusion springs burst
out on every hand!
Merrily the waters gurgled, and the shock
which gave them birth
Fitly was by some declared a temperance
movement of the earth.
Astounded by the miracle, the people met
that night
To celebrate it properly by some religious
rite;
And ’tis truthfully recorded that
before the moon had sunk