"RUNNING HIM IN."
By a Good Templar in the Force.
A groan was heard, like a funeral note,
From a toper in mud half-buried,
And our Serjeant "Drunk and incapable" wrote,
When his form to the station we hurried.
We hurried him swiftly at dead of night,
And oft with our truncheons spurning,
Under many a gas-lamp's flickering light,
Through alley and crooked turning.
In rags and tatters the toper was dressed,
For in poverty drink had bound him.
And he lay like a pig in a gutter at rest,
With little pigs squeaking around him.
We lifted him up, but he fell as one dead,
And we tumbled him into a barrow;
And the idle spectators shouted and said,
"He'll be fined, with a caution, to-morrow!"
Lightly they talk of the spirit that's gone,
And o'er empty bottles upbraid him;
But little he'll reck, as they let him sleep on
In the cell where the constables laid him.
No curtains had he to his lonely bed,
And a rough deal plank was his pillow;
He will wake with parched throat and an aching head,
And thirst that would drink up a billow.
Roughly, yet sadly, we laid him down,
That toper, worn, haggard, and hoary,
And wished that the dissolute youth of the town
A warning might take from his story.
Funny Folks.