* * * * *

A PENNY FOR YOUR THOUGHTS!

(BY A PERPLEXED READER OF THE PENNY PAPERS.)

[Illustration]

  When you’re lying awake, with a horrid headache (to adopt a suggestion
      of GILBERT’s),
  When too freely you’ve dined, or too heavily wined, or munched too many
      walnuts or filberts;
  When your brain is a maze, and creation a haze, then each queer social
      craze—­there are many!—­
  Gets your wits in a spool, and there isn’t a fool for your thoughts
      would advance you a penny.

  You can’t sleep a wink, so the question of Drink, though you timidly
      shrink from it, harries you. 
  Your wit’s in a whirl, as you think, if some girl with a penchant for
      you, ups and marries you. 
  And ties you for life to the thing called a Wife,—­that figment, that
      fraud, that illusion,
  Where, what will you be?  And you can’t find a key to the epoch’s
      chaotic confusion. 
  It seems Local Option is sure of adoption, and what a tyrannic majority
  May “opt” for one day, you’re unable to say, and in vain you appeal to
      Authority. 
  The Law of the Land is a labyrinth grand, which you can’t understand,
      nor can anyone,
  And that is a thought, with delirium fraught, an appalling, if ’tis
      not a penny one.

  Now Law, the Old Antic, seems utterly frantic, absurdly romantic and
      maundering;
  And Cool Common Sense has gone dotty and dense, in dim deserts of
      Sentiment wandering. 
  Now Reason and Right, hydrocephalous quite, are both Della-Cruscan and
      drivelling,
  Life (barring the fun) like “The Mulberry One,” seems a mixture of
      diddling and snivelling. 
  There’s LAWSON who jaws on the Abstinence Cause on, and would lay his
      claws on the Nation,
  And put sudden stopper on all that’s improper (as he thinks) without
      compensation;
  And then there’s Sir EDWARD, who, when he goes bedward, must have his
      reflections nightmarish! 
  It seems, from such rigs, that our biggest Big Wigs are scarcest to
      govern a parish. 
  MCDOUGALL again, is agog to restrain all that gives his soul pain—­it’s
      a squeamish one!—­
  He thinks he’s a stayer as Jabberwock-slayer, mere Angry Boy he, not a
      Beamish One! 
  These Oracles windy do raise such a shindy, and kick such a doose of a
      dust up,
  One would think without them we were wrong stern and stem, and the whole
      of creation would bust up. 
  But verily why men should new worship Hymen,—­who, just as unshackled as
      Cupid,—­
  (See decision Re JACKSON), take burdens their backs on, I can_not_
      conceive.  It seems stupid
  Beyond all expression to have a “possession”