Shapes of Clay eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 224 pages of information about Shapes of Clay.

Shapes of Clay eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 224 pages of information about Shapes of Clay.

  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

Copyrights
Project Gutenberg
Shapes of Clay from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.