“But I won’t have it,” I said to him,
“I have my way of going,
An’ it’s girls that can’t do anything
That want to do the showing.”
He took it good—thinks I to myself
I’ll finish while I’m in it,
“There’s one thing, Sammie, I’ve never done,
An’ I’m old now to begin it.
I’m old to wait on your lady wife,
An’ stick to it day by day,
An’ listen to high-falutin’ talk,
An’ feel I’m just in the way.
An’ another thing,” I said to him,
Then stopped, an’ got red an’ hot,
“You needn’t think your babies I’ll mind,
Because I tell you I’ll not.”
I wish you could have heard the boy laugh,
He shook the things on the shelf,
“The dear little mammie, shan’t be ’bused”
He said, “I’ll mind ’em myself.”
All this talk I tell just to show
What a fickle thing I am,
An’ how little my words really meant
When I said all this to Sam.
It was only some four years ago,
An’ stowed in the big back hall
There’s machines for almost everything,
Leaning their backs to the wall.
My daughter-in-law ’tends to it all—
A good stout girl at her hand—
If I say it myself, you can’t find
Better kept house in the land.
The books, an’ papers, an’ flowers seem
Part of her every-day life,
An’ no doctor can ’tend to a sprain
Better than our Sammie’s wife.
Now, I like to sit here in my chair
An’ watch her happy an’ free,
An’ I like—yes, I’ll own up—I like
Baby to climb on my knee.
Poor old father is sillier yet,
A slave to three-year-old Jim,
My, he grins an’ looks proud as can be
Because the boy looks like him!
Oh, we all have our worries I know,
We find each blemish an’ flaw,
But there’s one perfect thing in this world—
Sam’s wife, my daughter-in-law.
Cold Water
MY niece from Boston, Minerva Bleak,
So learned they call her Madam,
With all her ’ologies, French and Greek,
With all the queer things she styles antique,
Came to see me, an’ Adam.
My brother, he wrote before she came,
A patient I send to you,
Just chase the cobwebs out of her brain,
And make her happy and sweet again,
Just now, she’s horribly blue.