And just as Mr. Keyser thought
His nose would split in two,
The pickerel gave his tail a twist,
And pulled Tim Keyser through,
And he was scudding through the waves
The first thing that he knew.
Then onward swam the savage fish
With swiftness towards its nest,
Still chewing Mr. Keyser's nose,
While Mr. Keyser guessed
What kind of policy would suit
His circumstances best.
Just then his nose was tickled
With a spear of grass close by;
Tim Keyser gave a sneeze which burst
The pickerel into "pi,"
And blew its bones, the ice, and waves
A thousand feet on high.
Tim Keyser swam up to the top,
A breath of air to take,
And finding broken ice, he hooked
His nose upon a cake,
And gloried in a nose that could
Such a concussion make.
His Christmas dinner on that day
He tackled with a vim;
And thanked his stars, as shuddering
He thought upon his swim,
That that wild pickerel had not
Spent Christmas eating him.
THE LOST EXPRESSION.
BY MARSHALL STEELE.
Oh! I fell in love with Dora, and my heart was all a-glow,
For I never met before a girl who took my fancy so;
She had eyes—no! cheeks a-blushing with the peach's ripening flush,
Was ecstatically gushing—and I like a girl to gush.
She'd the loveliest of faces, and the goldenest of hair,
And all customary graces lovers fancy in the fair.
Now, she doated on romances, she was yearnful and refined,
She had sentimental fancies of a most æsthetic kind,
She was sensitive, fantastic, tender, too, as she was fair,
But alas! she was not plastic, as I owned in my despair.
And, for all she was so gentle, yet she gave me this rebuff—
Though I might be sentimental, I'd not sentiment enough.
Then I did grow sentimental, for that seemed to be my part,
And I talked in transcendental fashion that might move her heart,
Sighed to live in fairy grottoes with my Dora all alone,
And I studied cracker mottoes, which I quoted as my own.
Thus I strove to be romantic, but I failed upon the whole,
And she nearly drove me frantic when she said I had not "soul."