Come youth and come age, from the study or stage,
From Bar or from Bench—high and low!
A green you must use as a cure for the blues—
You drive them away as you go.
We’re outward bound on a long, long round,
And it’s time to be up and away:
If worry and sorrow come back with the morrow,
At least we’ll be happy to-day.
THE DYING WHIP
It came from gettin’ ’eated, that was ’ow the thing begun,
And ’ackin’ back to kennels from a ninety-minute run;
‘I guess I’ve copped brownchitis,’ says I to brother Jack,
An’ then afore I knowed it I was down upon my back.
At night there came a sweatin’ as left me deadly weak,
And my throat was sort of tickly an’ it ’urt me for to speak;
An’ then there came an ’ackin’ cough as wouldn’t leave alone,
An’ then afore I knowed it I was only skin and bone
I never was a ’eavy weight. I scaled at seven four,
An’ rode at eight, or maybe at just a trifle more;
And now I’ll stake my davy I wouldn’t scale at five,
And I’d ’old my own at catch-weights with the skinniest jock alive.
And the doctor says the reason why I sit an’ cough an wheeze
Is all along o’ varmint, like the cheese-mites in the cheese;
The smallest kind o’ varmint, but varmint all the same,
Microscopes or somethin’—I forget the varmints’ name.
But I knows as I’m a goner. They never said as much,
But I reads the people’s faces, and I knows as I am such;
Well, there’s ’Urst to mind the ’orses and the ’ounds can look to Jack,
Though ’e never was a patch on me in ’andlin’ of a pack.
You’ll maybe think I’m boastin’, but you’ll find they all agree
That there’s not a whip in Surrey as can ’andle ’ounds like me;
For I knew ’em all from puppies, and I’d tell ’em without fail—
If I seed a tail a-waggin’, I could tell who wagged the tail.
And voices—why, Lor’ love you, it’s more than I can ’elp,
It just comes kind of natural to know each whine an’ yelp;
You might take them twenty couple where you will and let ’em run,
An’ I’d listen by the coverside and name ’em one by one.
I say it’s kind of natural, for since I was a brat
I never cared for readin’ books, or fancy things like that;
But give me ’ounds and ’orses an’ I was quite content,
An’ I loved to ear ’em talkin’ and to wonder what they meant.