THE MILKY MOLAR.
["Last week one of my back teeth dropped out in the middle Greek."—Schoolboy's letter.]
Last week at the preparatory school
Where Frederick learns how not to be a fool,
Where he disports at ease with Greek and Latin,
And mathematics too is fairly pat in—
On Tuesday morn, the subject being Greek
(It always is on that day in the week),
Our Frederick, biting hard, as youngsters do,
Bit a Greek root and cleft it clean in two.
This was a merely metaphoric bite;
The next was fact, and gave the boy a fright:
For lo! there came a crumbling
At the back of his mouth and a rumbling,
And a sort of sound like a grumbling,
And out there popped, as pert as you please,
A milky back tooth that had taken its ease
For too many weeks and months and years.
An object, when loose, of anxious fears,
It had now debouched and lost its place
At the back of a startled schoolboy's face.
Oh, out it popped,
And down it dropped
In the middle of Greek
Last Tuesday week.
Yet be not afraid, my lively lad,
For you shall renew the tooth you had;
The vacant place shall be filled, you'll find,
With another back tooth of a larger kind.
But a time will come when, if you lose
A tooth, as indeed you can't but choose,
You must go about
For ever without;
And, front or back, it returns to you never;
You have lost that tooth for ever and ever.
So stick to your teeth and accept my apology
For this easy lesson in odontology.