WHAT IS IN AN AIM.
(After "The Bridge.")
I went to bed at eleven,
At the sign of the Azure Boar,
And I knew that my room was seven,
For I'd seen it upon the door.
With a flickering, flaring candle,
That glimmered like sickly Hope,
I found out my way to the handle,
And I flung the portal ope,
When a gentleman—not to my thinking—
Was placed in the door upright;
It was evident he had been drinking,
For he hiccuped out in the night;
And he spoke in a language mighty,
That rang through the chill and gloom;
And he asked me, "Highty-tighty,"
"What the deuce do you do in my room?"
And never of warning mildly
A word had the stranger said,
Ere he took up a bootjack wildly,
And hurled it at my head;
And down with a noise and clatter
It fell o'er the winding stair,
And some one cried, "What's the matter?"
And I said, "I am not aware!"
And whenever I feel dyspeptic,
And whenever my soul's unwell,
And whenever I've got lumbago,
And whenever my eyelids swell,
I see the man with the bootjack,
He swears as he used to swear,
And I hear the implement falling
And clattering down the stair;
And I say to myself at twilight,
A vindictive person's a brute;
I'd rather have been on the skylight
Than down at the staircase foot!
For whatever evil you suffer,
The words of the sage rehearse,
"Though things may be bad, you duffer,
They might be a good deal worse."
The Story of a Railway Tavern, by Professor Long, Fellow of the Learned Societies, contained in Vere Vereker's Vengeance, by Thomas Hood, 1865.
Reference was made, on page 80, to Edmund H. Yates's parody on Evangeline, it is to be found in "Mirth and Metre," by F. E. Smedley and E. H. Yates, 1855.
It commences thus:—