Now April with sweet showers of freshening rain
Has roused last summer's vigorous breath once more;
'Tis in the air, the house, the street, the lane—
Puffs through the walls and oozes through the floor.
The rau-cous-throated frog ayont the sty
Sends forth, as erst, his amerous vermal croak,
Each hungry mooly casts her swivel eye
For pots and pails in which her nose to poke.
With gurgling glee the gutter gushes by,
Fraught all with filth, unknown and nameless dirt—
A dead green goose, an o'er-ripe rat I spy;
Head of a cat, tail of a flannel shirt.
The querulous cry of every gabbling goose
From thousand-scented mudholes echoes o'er;
The dogs and yawling cats have gotten loose
And mock the hideous howls of hell once more.
By yon scrub oak, where roots the sallow sow,
In where John Murphy's wife outpours her slop;
Right there you'll find there's almost stench now
To cause the world its nostrils to estop.
And yonder dauntless goat that bank adown,
That wreathes his old fantastic horns so high,
Gnaws sadly on the bustle of Miss Brown,
Which she discarded in the months gone by.
So in Goose Island cometh April round;
Full eagerly we watch the month's approach—
The season of sweet sight and pleasant sound,
The season of the bedbug and the roach.

REPORT OF THE BASEBALL GAME.

It was a very pleasant game,
And there was naught of grumbling
Until the baleful tidings came
That Williamson was "fumbling."
Then all at once a hideous gloom
Fell o'er all manly features,
And Clayton's cozy, quiet room
Was full of frantic creatures.
"Click, click," the tiny ticker went,
The tape began to rattle,
And pallid, eager faces bent
To read the news from battle;
Down, down, ten million feet or more,
Chicago's hope went tumbling,
When came the word that Burns and Gore
And Pfeffer, too, were "fumbling."
No diagram was needed then
To point the Browns to glory—
The simple fact that these four men
Were "fumbling" told the story.
There is not a club in all the land—
No odds how weak or humble—
That beats us when our short-stop and
Our second baseman "fumble."
There was some talk of hippodrome
'Mid frequent calls for liquor,
Then each Chicago man went home
Much wiser, poorer, sicker;
And many a giant intellect
Seemed slowly, surely crumbling
Beneath the dolorous effect
Of that St. Louis "fumbling."
Ah, well, the struggle's but just begun,
So what is the use of fretting
If by a little harmless fun
Our boys can bull the betting?
When comes the tug of war there'll be
No accidental stumbling,
And then, you bet your boots, you'll see
No mention made of "fumbling."

THE ROSE.

Since the days of old Adam the welkin has rung
With the praises of sweet scented posies,
And poets in rapturous phrases have sung
The paramount beauties of roses.
Wheresoever she bides, whether nestling in lanes
Or gracing the proud urban bowers,
The red, royal rose her distinction maintains
As the one regnant queen among flowers.
How joyous are we of the west when we find
That Fate, with her gifts ever chary,
Has decreed that the Rose, who is queen of her kind
Shall bloom on our wild western prairie.
Let us laugh at the east as an impotent thing
With envy and jealously crazy,
While grateful Chicago is happy to sing
In the praise of the rose—she's a daisy.