They trimmed 'em and they wired 'em, and they trimmed an' wired

'em still,

And every precious minute kept a-running up the bill.

My soft-spoke guest a-seeking, did I rave and rush and run; He was supping with a neighbor, just a three-mile further on. "Do you think," I fiercely shouted, "that I want a mile of wire To save each separate hay-cock out o' heaven's consumin' fire? Do you think to keep my buildin's safe from some uncertain harm,

I'm goin' to deed you over all the balance of my farm?"

He looked up quite astonished, with a face devoid of guile,
And he pointed to the contract with a reassuring smile:
It was the first occasion that he disagreed with me;
But he held me to that paper with a firmness sad to see;
And for that thunder story, ere the rascal finally went,
I paid two hundred dollars, if I paid a single cent.
And if any lightnin'-rodder wants a dinner-dialogue
With the restaurant department of an enterprising dog,
Let him set his mill a-runnin' just inside my outside gate,

And I'll bet two hundred dollars that he won't have long to wait.

Ingersoll to His Gr-r-r-r-eat Grandmother.

VENERABLE mammal, see thy happy son,

Victor e'n now, life's journey but half run.
Dost thou not hover with prehensile clinging

On some convenient limb above my pathway swinging,
And glory that thy faith, my grand prothonotary,
Thy child is holding still, without a wish to vary?
Instinctively I squddle in thy morass stygian,
And hang on by the tail to thy lock-jawed religion.
Oft doth thy larnyx cheer my dutiful tympanum
On protoplasmic genesis and reasonless organum;
But yet I feel the loss of elongated caudal,

And sometimes fear to stir across the vast and oozy mud ile,
Without thy hand maternal to lift me o'er the bogs,
And thy maturer bellow to scare away the fogs,
And reinspire my liver while I secrete the wonder,
Petitio principii, and knock the church to thunder.
Dear Grandma, let thy bowels, with peristaltic yearning,
Indulge a lovely colic in honor of my learning,

And make me brave to say the stale old saws so cutely
That every ass shall bray in sympathy astutely.
By some sporadic throe I missed the olden shape,
And grew a hairless, tailless, extratypal ape;

But never fear that I shall turn a Christian flunkey-
Religiously I'm true to thee as any other monkey,
As mooney in my pet materialistic bungles

As any of my cousin apes disporting in the jungles.

Dear Grandma, think with pride (now that is just a "figger,'
For dust of course can't think, whether of ape or nigger,
Or Huxley the big heap, or Ingersoll the bigger;

But, just to keep the run of common ways of writing,

I 'postrophize the old thing's hair and bones in my inditing)—
Dear Grandma, think with pride, that, while in art and sciences
We've got right smart ahead of thy old-time reliances,-
We plow the seas with ships, and disembowel mountains,
And lay the iron rail, and cast the brazen fountains,
And pile up marble cities, and gang-plow all our prairies,

And eat with knives and forks, with cheese from our own dairies,
And hitch the steam to wheels, and paint with sunbeam brushes,
And make the lightning write our bills till all creation rushes,
And print such lots of books, and do such lots of "thinking,"
And have such artificial ways of eating and of drinking,
Of riding and of walking, of waking and of sleeping,

Of dressing up our heads and feet, of spending and of keeping,
Of owning honest acres, of sowing and of reaping,
Of playing on four fiddle-strings, of laughing and of weeping,
Of running banks and big hotels, of fencing and surveying-
Yet, true to our ancestral ilk, we make no head at praying;
We keep the old marsupial stride, the rodent's rare religion,
And worship like a hedgehog still, and reason like a pigeon.
Bless your old heart, my Simian ma (that "heart's" another
"figger "),

The joy of this triumphal hour will make you fairly snigger.
And all my children, down the line, I mean shall keep a-saying
The half a score of patent jibes with consentaneous braying,
"No government" did royal work for me, familia mater-
It turned me t'other end before to run by wind or water;

INGERSOLL TO HIS GR-R-R-R-EAT GRANDMOTHER. 251

And I shall leave the ancient plan to my descendants darling, Assured that every great-great-grand will be an ape or starling; And when this broad and manly bust has shot its final blizzard, They'll write above me: "Dust to dust wan't spoken of the gizzard."

[The author begs to suggest the following epitaph as suitable to the occasion contemplated in the last two lines above.]

Here lies the self-applauded brave,

The biggest of the bigots;
Borne empty to his empty grave,

Drained dry by his own spigots.
He lies (as while he lived he lied)
Before the walls of Zion,

Kicked by his own old gun, he died
Without a hope to die on.

His double-ender would not steer

The boiler, thin and rusty,
Collapsed, and killed the engineer,

And so his hopes were "busted."
The Devil lost a brilliant dupe

When Bob missed stays and petered,
And sadly mourns his sprightly supe

In dirges many-metered.

Plenty remain with animus.

As evil and conceited,

But none can make so big a fuss
With old Tom Paine repeated.
He threw about the rotten bones

With most ferocious clatter,

And swapped the fullness of his tones.
For emptiness of matter.

Bob meant to give the world a shock,
But, blinded with contumacy,
He ran his head against THE ROCK!
Sic req'escat in pace.

The Vagabonds.

E are two travelers, Roger and I.
Roger's my dog;-come here you scamp!
Jump for the gentlemen,-mind your eye!
Over the table,-look out for the lamp!-

The rogue is growing a little old;

Five years we've tramped through wind and weather, And slept out-doors when nights were cold,

And ate and drank- and starved together.

We've learned what comfort is, I tell you!
A bed on the floor, a bit of rosin,

A fire to thaw our thumbs (poor fellow!

The paw he holds up there's been frozen),

Plenty of catgut for my fiddle,

(This out-door business is bad for strings), Then a few nice buckwheats hot from the griddle, An Roger an I set up for kings!

No, thank ye, sir,- I never drink;

Roger and I are exceedingly moral,

Well, something hot, then, we won't quarrel.