Who’d been upon a winter’s cruise,

Return’d with the returning spring—

Some hundred brothers of the wing,

Curious to hear from foreign realms,

Got round him in a tuft of elms.

He shook his pinions, struck his beak,

Attempted twice or thrice to speak;

At length, up-rising on his stand,

“Old England! Well, the land’s a land!

But rat me, gentlemen,” says he,