* * *
Spake John Grogblossom the coachman to Eliza Spinks the cook:
“Mrs. Spinks,” says he, “I’ve foundered: ‘Liza dear, I’m overtook.
Druv into a corner reglar, puzzled as a babe unborn;
Speak the word, my blessed ‘Liza; speak, and John the coachman’s yourn.”
Then Eliza Spinks made answer, blushing, to the coachman John:
“John, I’m born and bred a spinster: I’ve begun and I’ll go on.
Endless cares and endless worrits, well I knows it, has a wife:
Cooking for a genteel family, John, it’s a goluptious life!
“I gets £20 per annum—tea and things o’ course not reckoned,—
There’s a cat that eats the butter, takes the coals, and breaks my second:
There’s soci’ty—James the footman;—(not that I look after him;
But he’s aff’ble in his manners, with amazing length of limb;)—
“Never durst the missis enter here until I’ve said ‘Come in’:
If I saw the master peeping, I’d catch up the rolling-pin.
Christmas-boxes, that’s a something; perkisites, that’s something too;
And I think, take all together, John, I won’t be on with you.”
John the coachman took his hat up, for he thought he’d had enough;
Rubbed an elongated forehead with a meditative cuff;
Paused before the stable doorway; said, when there, in accents mild,
“She’s a fine young ’oman, cook is; but that’s where it is, she’s spiled.”
* * *
I have read in some not marvellous tale,
(Or if I have not, I’ve dreamed)
Of one who filled up the convivial cup
Till the company round him seemed
To be vanished and gone, tho’ the lamps upon
Their face as aforetime gleamed:
And his head sunk down, and a Lethe crept
O’er his powerful brain, and the young man slept.
Then they laid him with care in his moonlit bed:
But first—having thoughtfully fetched some tar—
Adorned him with feathers, aware that the weather’s
Uncertainty brings on at nights catarrh.