“Sure it’s all the same, they were twins. I made a little song about them one evening last week,—the women I mean.”
“Let us have it, Maurice; let us have it, old fellow. What’s the measure?”
“Short measure; four little verses, devil a more!”
“But the time, I mean?”
“Whenever you like to sing it; here it is,”—
THE GIRLS OF THE WEST.
Air,—“Teddy, ye Gander.”
(With feeling: but not too slow.)
You may talk, if you please,
Of the brown Portuguese,
But wherever you roam, wherever you roam,
You nothing will meet,
Half so lovely or sweet,
As the girls at home, the girls at home.
Their eyes are not sloes,
Nor so long is their nose,
But between me and you, between me and you,
They are just as alarming,
And ten times more charming,
With hazel and blue, with hazel and blue.
They don’t ogle a man,
O’er the top of their fan
Till his heart’s in a flame, till his heart’s in a flame
But though bashful and shy,
They’ve a look in their eye
That just comes to the same, just comes to the same.
No mantillas they sport,
But a petticoat short
Shows an ankle the best, an ankle the best,
And a leg—but, O murther!
I dare not go further;
So here’s to the west, so here’s to the west.
“Now that really is a sweet little thing. Moore’s isn’t it?”
“Not a bit of it; my own muse, every word of it.”
“And the music?” said I.
“My own, too. Too much spice in that bowl; that’s an invariable error in your devisers of drink, to suppose that the tipple you start with can please your palate to the last; they forget that as we advance, either in years or lush, our tastes simplify.”