And London sportsmen (sportsmen?) meet
To shoot at sparrows twenty feet
Like ginger-beer escaping,—poppers:
Pigeons are thus humanely shot.
And thus they go to pie and pot,
Poor pulse and crum-b-led Hoppers!
Trees in their shrouds resemble men,
And they who “cut may come again,”
To take their tithe as legal loppers:
Soldiers and sailors, after wars,
In spite of glory, fame, and stars,—
Are they not pen-sion Hoppers?
Yet more than these, in summer’s even,
There hop, between the blades of Heaven
And hailstones pearly droppers,
Insects of mirth, whose songs so shrill
Delight the ears of vale and hill,
The grassy, green—Grass-Hoppers.
Aug. 1827. J. R. P.
For the Table Book.
WASPS.
A grocer’s shop at Camberwell—“the Grasshopper”—is much visited by wasps for the sweets of the sugar hogsheads. The shop is closed on Sundays, but they find entrance into it by creeping privately through the keyhole of the door.
C. W. P.