SONG BY SIR ABEL HANDY.
'Twas on a summer morning in this tropical July,
A happy thought impelled me an experiment to try.
Hot early, weather promised to be more hot later on:
What were the highest grade the glass would register anon?
A delicate thermometer, the Fahrenheit, was mine;
I placed it in the solar-beams direct, A.M., at nine.
It shortly rose to ninety; and by ten reached twenty more;
Eftsoon degrees one-hundred-nine-and-twenty was the score;
Glass went on rising near as high as it was marked to go.
A hundred, three times ten, and six the highest it could show.
Excelsior! as Longfellow's ascending Pilgrim cried;
So I began to marvel what was going to betide,
Expanding still the spirit rose within, ere noon had past,
Till bang went my thermometer, the brittle tube had brast!
My old and well-tried servant through ten years in hot or cold,
At last it suddenly went smash, a pity to behold,
I sat me down and sent the Post the story of its loss,
Take warning all Philosophers my tale who come across!
Experimental Science—mind the moral that I sing—
Is with a little knowledge in pursuit a parlous thing.