"Lor' bless yer, Sir, that's all right, Sir! That ain't a Fly, Sir!—That's a bit of Dirt!"
BALLAST FOR THAT BALLOON;
Or, Rubbish to be Shot at the Pole.
Dr. Andrée, if you're going to the Pole by a balloon,
(Punch hopes you'll be successful, and he trusts you'll come back soon,)
Could you find a little room for some companions in your car?
We have some whom we should like to see thus travelling afar.
Place aux dames! There's the New Woman whom we really do not want,
And the Female-suffrage female, and the shrieking slave of Cant;
There's the Fashionable Mother who constricts her daughters' waists,
There's the Woman with a Past, who so pollutes the public tastes;
There's the female who is masculine, the male effeminate,
The Hedonist of hollow heart and paradox-muddled pate;
There's that big bore the Degenerate, he'll turn up, divil doubt him!
And that other bore, almost as big, who writes big books about him;
There's the pedlar of Emotions, and the petty foe of Morals,
There's the stirrer up in newspapers of journalistic quarrels;
There's the thorough paced denouncer of Creation's horror—Man;
There's the muckrake wielding maunderer on the Mysteries of Pan;
There's the dirty dynamiter, the neurotic novelist!—
Oh, take them to the Pole, Sir, I'll be happy to assist,
And drop them there—and leave them there—"they never will be missed!"
On account of the vogue for cycling in Battersea Park this summer, the past two months will be remembered as the "Bike-at-Batterseason '95."
BY OUR NOTES-AND-QUERY-MAN.
Mem. for the next Historian of England.