Quoth: "What is our life but a dream of pride ? Destruction stalks forth on every side,

And if my wife should know!

" What matters it all if I can maintain

My right to reap and sow? To gather what I have planted in pain ?” Here he paused, and murmured the same refrain :

“ But--if my wife should know!"

I passed next morning, and under the trees

I saw the parson stand, Amid rustle of leaves and hum of bees, 'Mid glint of flowers, yet brighter than hese,

His look serene and bland.

But what saw I in the shrubbery there,

That filled me with affright-
So dismally white and gaunt and bare,
Yet floating so daintily in the air,

As if to mock the sight?

Three ghastly skeletons stood in a row,

To guard the berry patch;
The soft breeze tilted them to and fro,
And their old bones rattled a chanting low,
· "No berries here you snatch!"

Three skeletons brought from a closet down,

Where they had lived at ease;
And the birds were all flown, far up and down
In wildest rambles through country and town-

Naught had they seen like these.

The parson stood by his strawberry bed,

His wife came strolling down, The berries were large and ripe and red. “Dear, your hoops have saved the berries," he said;

“Buy new ones in the town."

THE BALLAD OF A BUTOHER.
It was a gruesome butcher,
· With countenance saturnine;
He stood at the door of his little shop

It was the hour of nine.

The children going by the school

Looked in at the open door;
They loved to see the sausage machine

And hear its awful roar.

The butcher he looked out and in,

Then horribly he swore ;
Next yawned, then, smiling, he licked his chops;

Quoth he: "Life's an awful bore!"

“ Now here's all these dear little children,

Some on 'em might live to be sixty;
Why shouldn't I save them the trouble to wunst,

An' chop 'em up slipperty licksty ?"
So he winked to the children and beckoned 'em in:

“Oh, don't ye's want some candy ? But ye see ye'll have to come into the shop,

For out here it isn't handy!"

He 'ticed them into the little shop,

The machine went round and round,
And when these poor babes came out again

They fetched ten cents a pound.

DREAM OF A SPELLING BEE.

PUNCH.
Menageries where sleuth hounds caracole,

Where jaguar plalanx and phlegmatic gou
Fright ptarmigan and kestrels check by jowl,

With peewit and precocious cockatoo.

Gaunt seneschals in crotchety cockades,

With seine net trawl for porpoise in lagoons, While scullions gauge erratic escapades

Of madrepores in water-logged galoons.

Flamboyant triptychs groined with gherkins green,

In reckless fracas with cognettish brcam, Ecstatic gargoyles, with grotesque chagrin,

Garnish the gruesome nightmare of my dream.

BITUMEN. In the lush limes, when oil wells were the theme

Whereon all enterprising minds were dwellingi. And every speculator's fondest dream Saw great Petroleum's aromatic stream The fat of nature's broth, plutonic cream

Spontaneously from his own well upwelling,
Twelve gentlemen, on money making bent,

Assembled in an upper chamber spacious,
To listen to an "enterprising gent,"
While he to them should make it evident
Much money might be made for little spent

By any one sufficiently sagacious;
To furnish funds, by him to be invested
In a location he himself had tested:
“The territory where that well and derrick are
Is the best oil country in America.
The drill will very shortly reach the bed rock,

Being already promisingly started."

We paid our money and we took our stock,
Whereat our disinterested friend departed.
And then I marked, as I have marked before,

'Twas not possessing riches great or small

That fixed the due proportion each one bore.
Those who have little always give the more,
And those give least who have the greatest store.

On them all burdens do most lightly fall,
While some are like the cobbler in his stall
When into one small hole be puts his little awl..

Why need I here repeat the old, old story?

We never saw again our cherished pelf; The hearer will have guessed so à priori,

And very likely knows how 'tis himself. When the whole enterprise had gone to pot, ...

Onee more we stockholders convened a meeting In the same sadly well remembered spot- . We came to see where all our wealth was not,

And to the rest one then and there gave greeting : “We poor outsiders do not feel so sore (Although we're neither more nor less than human)

At having sacrificed our little store,
For you rich folks, who know so vastly more,

Have been deceived in spite of your acumen;

Although it has no oil it has bit-you-men."

POMP AND I. Pomp lies in one chair, I in another. (Pomp's a black cat, I'm his brother.)

There we lie blinkin' in the sun,
Blinkin' and thinkin'. Oh! what fun.

What d' you 'spose we're thinkin' 'bout ?
One o' the things no fellow can find out.

I'm so glad I'm nothing but a cat.
Pomp he says, “ that's so," to that.

Fat and lazy all day long,
Plenty to eat and can't do wrong.
When it comes to the end of day
We go to sleep in a bed of hay.

All I can say is, I'm happy as a cat.
“Happy as a clam," is nothin' to that.

THE MONKEY TO THE POLYP. Evolved from thee, forsooth, thou thing! Thou pulpy nondescript, with no sure place In either kingdom. Who the faintest trace, Perceives of future power and Simian grace

In thee, small polyp?
Behold these limbs, so supple and so strong;
These eyes, which keen intelligence express; ii.
This tail! Oh, may its shadow ne'er grow less
In that humiliating base process !

The (so-called) wise affirm.
Darwin forbear! The very thought
Of evolution from a pulp like this
Doth make all Simiadze howl and hiss-
We that are ranked as gods and live in bliss

Where India's temples rise.
Give us the proof, ye scientists! Bring on
The fossil beast whose lineaments betray
Transition's progress; then, perhaps, we may
Believe the wild romance. But, now-nay, nay,

'Tis ducks ve surely hear.
Survival of the fittest! If, indeed,
This doctrine be the true one, tell me why
Yon ugly mandrill stalks beneath the sky,
While fairer Simian flowers in silence lie

To frisk no more.