CURE FOR HOMESICKNESS
She wrote to her daddy in Portland, Maine, from
out in Denver, Col.,
And she wrote, alas, despondently that life had
commenced to pall;
And this was a woful, woful case, for she was
a six months’ bride
Who was won and wed in the State of Maine by
the side of the bounding tide.
And ah, alack, she was writing back that she
longed for Portland, Maine,
Till oh, her feelings had been that wrenched she
could hardly stand the strain!
Though her hubby dear was still sincere, she
sighed the livelong day
For a good old sniff of the sewers and salt from
the breast of Casco bay.
And she wrote she sighed, and she said she’d
cried, and her appetite fell off,
And she’d grown as thin’s a belaying-pin, with a
terrible hacking cough;
And she sort of hinted that pretty soon she’d
start on a reckless scoot
And hook for her home in Portland, Maine, by
the very shortest route.
But her daddy dear was a man of sense, and he
handles fish wholesale,
And he sat and fanned himself awhile with a
big broad codfish tail;
And he recollected the way he felt when he
dwelt in the World’s Fair whirl.
He slapped his head. “By hake,” he said, “I
know what ails that girl.”
And he went to a ten-cord pile of cod and he
pulled the biggest out,
A jib-shaped critter, broad’s a sail,—three feet
from tail to snout.
And he pasted a sheet of postage stamps from
snout clear down to tail,
Put on a quick delivery stamp, and sent the cod
by mail.
She smelled it a-coming two blocks off on the
top of the postman’s pack;
She rushed to meet him, and scared him blind by
climbing the poor man’s back.
But she got the fish, hit out a hunk, ate postage
stamps and all,
And a happy wife in a happy home lives out in
Denver, Col.