Twelve angry doctors wrangled so,
That twelve had struck an hour ago,
Before they had an eye to throw
On the departed;
Twelve heads turn’d round at once, and lo!
Twelve doctors started.
Whether some comrade of the dead,
Or Satan took it in his head
To steal the corpse—the corpse had fled!
’Tis only written,
That “there was nothing in the bed,
But twelve were bitten!”
MISS KILMANSEGG AND HER PRECIOUS LEG.
A GOLDEN LEGEND.
[Her Pedigree.]
O trace the Kilmansegg pedigree
To the very root of the family tree
Were a task as rash as ridiculous:
Through antedilvian mists as thick
As London fog such a line to pick
Were enough, in truth, to puzzle old Nick,—
Not to name Sir Harris Nicolas.
It wouldn’t require much verbal strain
To trace the Kil-man, perchance, to Cain,
But, waiving all such digressions,
Suffice it, according to family lore,
A Patriarch Kilmansegg lived of yore,
Who was famed for his great possessions.
Tradition said he feather’d his nest
Through an Agricultural Interest
In the Golden Age of farming;
When golden eggs were laid by the geese,
And Colchian sheep wore a golden fleece,
And golden pippins—the sterling kind
Of Hesperus—now so hard to find—
Made Horticulture quite charming!
A Lord of Land, on his own estate,
He lived at a very lively rate,
But his income would bear carousing;
Such acres he had of pasture and heath,
With herbage so rich from the ore beneath,
The very ewe’s and lambkin’s teeth
Were turn’d into gold by browsing.