ANALGESIA.
(With Mr. Punch's best wishes for the speedy recovery of the French President.)
["President Deschanel ... was compelled to take several analgesia cachets. (Analgesia is a condition in which there is incapacity of feeling pain).">[—Evening Paper.
When, haply through excess of cake,
In childhood's days of fun and frolic,
I suffered from that local ache
Known to the Faculty as colic;
Or if across the foam I fared
And was (invariably) sea-sick,
How much distress had I been spared
Just by a simple analgesic.
In the Headmaster's awesome den,
His cane poised o'er me palely bending,
A lozenge deftly swallowed then
Had eased the smart of its descending.
Thus might I have indulged in "rags,"
Immune from every sore corrective,
Nor need I then have stuffed my bags
With notebooks, often ineffective.
Henceforth, in any sort of fuss—
Life's little incidental dramas,
As when one boards a motor-bus
Or leaps from trains in one's pyjamas—
I'll take a tabloid. Deschanel!
So much to me your agile feat meant;
L'exemple presidentiel
Lends quite a cachet to the treatment.