Library of the best American literature / Containing the lives of our authors in story form, their portraits, their homes, and their personal traits, how they worked and what they wrote; choice selections from eminent writers, embracing great American poets and novelists, foremost women in American letters, distinguished critics and essayists, our national humorists, noted journalists and magazine contributors, popular writers for young people, great orators and public lecturers

by Unknown

That you haven’t heard folks tell

How Jimmy Bludso passed in his checks

The night of the Prairie Belle?

He weren’t no saint—them engineers

Is all pretty much alike—

One wife in Natchez-under-the-Hill,

And another one here, in Pike;

A keerless man in his talk was Jim,

And an awkward hand in a row,

But he never flunked, and he never lied—