FLEET STROTHER
What! you were born, you animated doll,
Within the shadow of the Capitol?
'Twas always thought (and Bancroft so assures
His trusting readers) it was reared in yours.
CALIFORNIAN SUMMER PICTURES
THE FOOT-HILL RESORT
Assembled in the parlor
Of the place of last resort,
The smiler and the snarler
And the guests of every sort—
The elocution chap
With rhetoric on tap;
The mimic and the funny dog;
The social sponge; the money-hog;
Vulgarian and dude;
And the prude;
The adiposing dame
With pimply face aflame;
The kitten-playful virgin—
Vergin' on to fifty years;
The solemn-looking sturgeon
Of a firm of auctioneers;
The widower flirtatious;
The widow all too gracious;
The man with a proboscis and a sepulcher beneath.
One assassin picks the banjo, and another picks his teeth.
AT ANCHOR
The soft asphaltum in the sun;
Betrays a tendency to run;
Whereas the dog that takes his way
Across its course concludes to stay.
THE IN-COMING CLIMATE
Now o' nights the ocean breeze
Makes the patient flinch,
For that zephyr bears a sneeze
In every cubic inch.
Lo! the lively population
Chorusing in sternutation
A catarrhal acclamation!
A LONG-FELT WANT
Dimly apparent, through the gloom
Of Market-street's opaque simoom,
A queue of people, parti-sexed,
Awaiting the command of "Next!"
A sidewalk booth, a dingy sign:
"Teeth dusted nice—five cents a shine."
TO THE HAPPY HUNTING GROUNDS
Wide windy reaches of high stubble field;
A long gray road, bordered with dusty pines;
A wagon moving in a "cloud by day."
Two city sportsmen with a dove between,
Breast-high upon a fence and fast asleep—
A solitary dove, the only dove
In twenty counties, and it sick, or else
It were not there. Two guns that fire as one,
With thunder simultaneous and loud;
Two shattered human wrecks of blood and bone!
And later, in the gloaming, comes a man—
The worthy local coroner is he,
Renowned all thereabout, and popular
With many a remain. All tenderly
Compiling in a game-bag the débris,
He glides into the gloom and fades from sight.
The dove, cured of its ailment by the shock,
Has flown, meantime, on pinions strong and fleet,
To die of age in some far foreign land.
SLANDER
FITCH:
"All vices you've exhausted, friend;
So all the papers say."
PICKERING:
"Ah, what vile calumnies are penned!—
'Tis just the other way."
JAMES L. FLOOD
As oft it happens in the youth of day
That mists obscure the sun's imperfect ray,
Who, as he's mounting to the dome's extreme,
Smites and dispels them with a steeper beam,
So you the vapors that begirt your birth
Consumed, and manifested all your worth.
But still one early vice obstructs the light
And sullies all the visible and bright
Display of mind and character. You write.
FOUR CANDIDATES FOR SENATOR
To flatter your way to the goad of your hope,
O plausible Mr. Perkins,
You'll need ten tons of the softest soap
And butter a thousand firkins.
The soap you could put to a better use
In washing your hands of ambition
Ere the butter's used for cooking your goose
To a beautiful brown condition.
* * * * *
"The Railroad can't run Stanford." That is so—
The tail can't curl the pig; but then, you know,
Inside the vegetable-garden's pale
The pig will eat more cabbage than the tail.
* * * * *
When Sargent struts by all the lawmakers say:
"Right—left!" It is fair to infer
The right will get left, nor polar the day
When he makes that thing to occur.
Not so, not so, 'tis a joke, that cry—
Foolish and dull and smalclass="underline"
He so bores them for votes that they mean to imply
He's a drill-Sargent, that is all.
* * * * *
Gods! what a sight! Astride McClure's broad back
Estee jogs round the Senatorial track,
The crowd all undecided, as they pass,
Whether to cheer the man or cheer the ass.
They stop: the man to lower his feet is seen
And the tired beast, withdrawing from between,
Mounts, as they start again, the biped's neck,
And scarce the crowd can say which one's on deck.
A GROWLER
Judge Shafter, you're an aged man, I know,
And learned too, I doubt not, in the law;
And a head white with many a winter's snow
(I wish, however that your heart would thaw)
Claims reverence and honor; but the jaw
That's always wagging with a word malign,
Nagging and scolding every one in sight
As harshly as a jaybird in a pine,
And with as little sense of wrong and right
As animates that irritable creature,
Is not a very venerable feature.
You damn all witnesses, all jurors too
(And swear at the attorneys, I suppose,
But that's commendable) "till all is blue";
And what it's all about, the good Lord knows,
Not you; but all the hotter, fiercer glows
Your wrath for that—as dogs the louder howl
With only moonshine to incite their rage,
And bears with more ferocious menace growl,
Even when their food is flung into the cage.
Reform, your Honor, and forbear to curse us.
Lest all men, hearing you, cry: "Ecce ursus!"