JACK JONES, THE RECRUIT.—A HINT FROM OVID.
Jack Jones was a toper: they say that some how
He'd a foot always ready to kick up a row;
And, when half-seas over, a quarrel he pick'd,
To keep up the row he had previously kick'd.
He spent all, then borrow'd at twenty per cent.
His mistress fought shy when his money was spent,
So he went for a soldier; he could not do less,
And scorn'd his fair Fanny for hugging brown Bess.
"Halt—Wheel into line!" and "Attention—Eyes right!"
Put Bacchus, and Venus, and Momus to flight
But who can depict half the sorrows he felt
When he dyed his mustachios and pipe-clay'd his belt?
When Sergeant Rattan, at Aurora's red peep,
Awaken'd his tyros by bawling—"Two deep!"
Jack Jones would retort, with a half-suppress'd sigh,
"Ay! too deep by half for such ninnies as I."
Quoth Jones—"'Twas delightful the bushes to beat
With a gun in my hand and a dog at my feet,
But the game at the Horse-Guards is different, good lack!
Tis a gun in my hand and a cat at my back."
To Bacchus, his saint, our dejected recruit.
One morn, about drill time, thus proffer'd his suit—
"Oh make me a sparrow, a wasp, or an ape—
All's one, so I get at the juice of the grape."
The God was propitious—he instantly found
His ten toes distend and take root in the ground;
His back was a stem, and his belly was bark,
And his hair in green leaves overshadow'd the Park.
Grapes clustering hung o'er his grenadier cap,
His blood became juice, and his marrow was sap:
Till nothing was left of the muscles and bones
That form'd the identical toper, Jack Jones.
Transform'd to a vine, he is still seen on guard,
At his former emporium in Great Scotland-yard;
And still, though a vine, like his fellow-recruits,
He is train'd, after listing, his ten-drills, and shoots.
New Monthly Magazine.