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What? what to charming modesty belongs!
Obedient to her soft command,

He raised it but not with his hand!

No, marvelling reader, but the chimney tongs.

What a chaste thought in this good king;
How clever!

When shall we hear again of such a thing?

Lord! never.

Now were our princes to be prayed

To such an act by some fair maid,

I'll bet my life not one would mind it;

But handy, without more ado,

The youths would search the bosom through,
Although it took a day to find it.

Proverbial Philosophy in New Dress
Teach not your parent's parent to extract
The golden contents of the egg by suction.
The good old lady can the feat enact

Quite irrespective of your kind induction.
A member of the feathered federation,
A prisoner by your palm and digits made,
Is worth at least a couple of his brothers
Who in your leafy arbor seek the shade.

Theory and Practice

Doctor (to brother physician)-"Yes, sir, the sovereign remedy for all ills is fresh air and plenty of it. People don't let enough air into their houses. Well, I must hurry off; I'm on an errand."

Brother Physician-"Going far ?''

Doctor-"No; only down to the hardware store to get half a mile of weather-strips."

THE HITS OF THE SATIRISTS

Thanks for Victory

Mr. Punch mercilessly satirized the despatches of a great royal soldier, a religiously minded man, as follows:

By the blessing of God, my dear Augusta,
We've had again an awful buster.

Ten thousand Frenchmen sent below;
Praise God from whom all blessings flow!

Battle Prayer

The following has been shrewdly suggested as a good form for a battle prayer:

O God, we who are about to plunge into battle pray Thee that Thou wilt be with us and so direct our guns that we may mow down the enemy like chaff. May we kill hundreds outright and maim many more, thereby causing gloom and desperation to settle upon the hearts and the hearthstones of our enemies.

O Thou God of Battles, enable us to make many widows and orphans; let there be hundreds of homes desolated; let there be devoted sons left to mourn the fathers that we shall kill; let there be distracted wives and mothers to cry unceasingly at the loss of the light of their homes and the support of their declining years.

O God, if there be good men on the other side who pray to Thee for success, turn Thou their prayers to empty words.

Let it be given to us to sink more ships and to cause more misery than our enemy, with all his striving, can do; and this we ask for the sake of Christ, who labored to bring peace and good-will to earth. Amen.

Silly Newspaper Queries

Those who are blessed with a keen sense of humor will appreciate the playful ridicule in a specimen letter published in the New York Evening Post:

"TO THE EDITOR:

Having for a long time been a reader of your valuable paper, I write to ask if you will have the kindness to inform me through the columns of the same who is the author of the following pathetic poem :

"Hard was he up ;

And in the hardness of his upness
Stole a ham.

"Down on him swooped,

And swooping, up him scooped,
The minions of the law.'

NEPTUNE."

Commenting upon this thrust at silly queries, the editor remarks: "It shows what a newspaper has practised upon it daily in one form or another; yet the writers of communications quite as absurd as the foregoing wear very solemn faces, and enter long complaints against the editors for declining to print queries which would merely make the public laugh, or may be answered by consulting the nearest dictionary, or are of no possible interest to anybody save the querist himself. A bit of satire like 'Neptune's' is a word to the

wise; we almost despair, however, of its producing any effect upon the foolish."

Puffery Extraordinary

A manufacturer of patent medicines wrote to a friend living on a farm in the West for a good strong recommendation for his (the manufacturer's) "Balsam." In a few days he received the following:

"DEAR SIR,-The land composing my farm had hitherto been so poor that a Scotchman could not get a living off it, and so stony that we had to slice our potatoes and plant them edgeways, but hearing of your balsam, I put some on a ten-acre lot surrounded by a railroad fence, and in the morning I found that the rock had entirely disappeared, a neat stone wall encircled the field, and the rails were split into oven wood, and piled up systematically in my back yard.

I put half an ounce into the middle of a huckleberry swamp; in two days it was cleared off, planted with corn and pumpkins, and a row of peach-trees in full blossom through the middle.

As an evidence of its tremendous strength, I would say that it drew a striking likeness of my eldest son out of a mill-pond, drew a blister all over his stomach, drew a load of potatoes four miles to market, and eventually drew a prize of ninety-seven dollars in a lottery.”

Beaconsfield

Among the abundant political satires aimed at Beaconsfield was the following, in which will be recognized his well-known passion for alliteration:

"I am the Peerless Premier,

"Tis mine to speak and yours to hear. Intelligent England! now the time has come, As all must own

And see,

When you must rally round Me and the Throne—
Particularly Me:

Or else the random rage of ruthless Rome,
The fickle falsehood of fair fawning France,
Bismarckian braggadocia from Berlin,

The mystic Muscovite's most monstrous maw,
Home-Rulers hoarsely howling hideous humbug, where,

smug

They batten on their melancholy isle," etc.

Burns's Impromptu

A specimen of Burns's facility in impromptu satire, when provoked by anything which he considered mean, is one of the memories of Brownhill Inn. It is related that he was washing at the horse-trough, having apparently been drinking all night. Just then a black-coated parson, who had slept at the inn, came out and ordered his horse. Before he mounted he said to the hostler, taking fourpence out of his pocket, "You see, I ought to give you all this fourpence, but I shall want to pay threepence for the ferry hard by, so I can only give you a penny." Burns, who had been looking on all the time, roared out,

"Black's your coat,

Black's your hair,

And black's your conscience, of which you've damned
little to spare."

He then gave the hostler sixpence.

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