DEATH IN THE CUP.
["The social duty of paying calls, refreshed, as it necessarily is, by frequent cups of tepid tea, is apparently little better than a process of slow poisoning."—Daily Graphic.]
"A word to you, Amanda mine!"
Oh, here's a pretty state of things! Whenever you go calling,
And take this deadly liquor and imbibe it without stint,
You're certainly preparing a catastrophe appalling,
Your mirth is as the little lamb's, unmindful of the mint.
And when your entertainer, who seems so sweetly placid
And quite unlike a criminal, suggests "Another cup?"
She might as well be offering a dose of prussic acid,
And the Public Prosecutor ought to take the matter up!
"The cup that cheers"—that hackneyed phrase is frightfully in error,
If seldom it "inebriates" (it does, the doctors plead),
There lurks within its fatal draught a more efficient terror,
'Twill shortly make a funeral your one and only need!
So since a daily cup or two the thin end of the wedge is,
And since this revelation of our danger has been made,
We all will wear red ribbons and will sign the strictest pledges,
And speedily inaugurate an "Anti-Tea" crusade.
A word to you, Amanda mine. Unless your cruel kindness,
Your efforts to consign me to an early grave, shall cease,
And if you dare, presuming on my long-continued blindness,
To offer me a cup of tea—I'll send for the police!
The Time of Day.—Good, after Newnes to find the style "Bart." The bestowal of the baronetcy quite a Tit-Bit for the Strand. But there is no truth in the report that the event will be followed by the establishment of a new morning paper to be called The Dragon, and edited by Sir George.