THE INDURATION.
Think not, dear love, because my cheek
With grief grows neither grey nor hollow,
Because no pharmacist I seek
In quest of arsenic to swallow,
Because I do not wince and weep
By day and night for cardiac pains,
That my fond passion falls on sleep,
Or, secondly, my worship wanes.
For these are strenuous days of strife
That steel the soul of every Briton;
Sterner and stronger grows our life
Till simple bards become hard-bitten;
So when, each Thursday, I propose
(As usual) to wed my fair,
I frankly find her changeless "No's"
Not half so poignant as they were.
From an almanack of appropriate quotations:—
"January 27.
Thursday.
German Emperor born, 1859.
O welcome, pure-ey'd Faith, white-handed Hope,
Thou hovering angel, girt with golden wings.—Milton."
"If men well up in years would cultivate a habit of breathing properly and always holding themselves erect when walking and sitting, we would find fewer elderly people bent double when we do."—Daily Express.
Our gay contemporary has been caught bending on this occasion.
"He asked the Government not to muzzle the ox that laid golden eggs."—The Daily Argosy (Demerara).
It wasn't really an ox; it was a bull.
From a country retail chemist's appeal to the Local Tribunal for his son's exemption from Military Service:
"I cannot dispense with him"—or, presumably, without him.
