And so, if you a labourer were,
    (The which of course you’re not),
  And saw a rabbit in your ground
    A-nibbling—­on the spot

  You’d go for him with spade or fork,
    At which, so it appears,
  There rang throughout the crowded room
    “Enthusiastic cheers.”

  A Peer’s advice is always good,
    So doubtless they will grab it,—­
  But no one will be happier than
    The cabbage-nibbling rabbit!

* * * * *

A LITTLE STRANGER.

["At the meeting of the Bermondsey Vestry, the Medical Officer reported that water drawn from the service-pipe of a house in the Jamaica Road, had been submitted to him.  The water was clear, but it contained a live horse-leech.”—­Daily Paper.]

  Oh, into our domestic pipes
    They crawl and creep by stealth,
  The gruesome creatures known unto
    An Officer of Health! 
  Harken to him of Bermondsey,
    Think what his murmurings teach,
  “The water seemed quite limpid, but—­
    It did contain a Leech!”

  The service-pipe was sound and good
    In the Jamaica Road;
  The cistern there had harboured ne’er
    Microbe, or newt, or toad;
  No clearer water softly laved
    A coral island beach;
  So thought the householder, until—­
    He found that awful Leech!

  Perchance he was a temperance foe
    To alcoholic drink,
  And from all dalliance with Bung
    Did scrupulously shrink. 
  Yet now to forms of fluid sin
    He’ll cotton, all and each;
  He does not like such liquors, but—­
    Prefers them to a Leech!

  Our pipes will not be pipes of peace
    If such things hap, I trow;
  And as for Water Trusts, ’tis hard
    To trust in water now. 
  Oh, Co. of Southwark and Vauxhall,
    We ratepayers beseech,
  Double your filtering charges, but—­
    Remove the loathly Leech!

* * * * *

OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

[Illustration]

There is a judicial review of GEORGE MEREDITH’s work in the Quarterly for October—­masterly, too, quoth the Baron, as striking a balance between effect and defect, and finding so much to be duly said in high praise of the diffuse and picturesquely-circumnavigating Novelist through whose labyrinthine pages the simple Baron finds it hard to thread his way, and yet keep the clue.  When the unskippingly conscientious peruser of GEORGE M.’s novels is most desirous that the author shall go ahead, GEORGE, like an Irish cardriver, will stop to “discoorse us,” and at such length, and so diffusely, and with such a wealth of eccentric word-coming and grammar-dodging, that at last the Baron gasps, choked by the rolling billows of sonorously booming or boomingly sonorous words, battles with the waves, ducks, and comes up