’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!”