Composing scales beside the rails

That flanked a field of corn,

A farmer's boy with vicious joy

Performed upon a horn:

The vagrant airs, the fragrant airs

Around that field that strayed,

Took flight before the flagrant airs

That noisome urchin played.

He played with care "The Maiden's Prayer;"

He played "God Save the Queen,"

"Die Wacht am Rhein," and "Auld Lang Syne,"

And "Wearing of the Green:"

With futile toots, and brutal toots,

And shrill chromatic scales,

And utterly inutile toots,

And agonizing wails.

The while he played, around him strayed,

And calmly chewed the cud,

Some thirty-nine assorted kine,

All ankle-deep in mud:

They stamped about and tramped about

That mud, till all the troupe

Made noises, as they ramped about,

Like school-boys eating soup.

Till, growing bored, with one accord

They broke the fence forlorn:

The field was doomed. The cows consumed

Two-thirds of all the corn,

And viciously, maliciously,

Went prancing o'er the loam.

That landscape expeditiously

Resembled harvest-home.

"Most idle ass of all your class,"

The farmer said with scorn:

"Just see my son, what you have done!

The cows are in the corn!"

"Oh drat," he said, "the brat!" he said.

The cowherd seemed to rouse.

"My friend, it's worse than that," he said.

"The corn is in the cows."

The moral lies before our eyes.

When tending kine and corn,

Don't spend your noons in tooting tunes

Upon a blatant horn:

Or scaling, and assailing, and

With energy immense,

Your cows will take a railing, and

The farmer take offense.

A Paris butcher kept a shop

Upon the river's bank

Where you could buy a mutton chop

Or two for half a franc.

The little shop was spruce and neat,

In view of all who trod the street

The decorated joints of meat

Were hung up in a rank.

This Gallic butcher led a life

Of highly moral tone;

He never raised his voice in strife,

He never drank alone:

He simply sat outside his door

And slept from eight o'clock till four;

The more he slept, so much the more

To slumber he was prone.

One day outside his shop he put

A pig he meant to stuff,

And carefully around each foot

He pinned a paper ruff,

But, while a watch he should have kept,

His habit conquered, and he slept,

And for a thief who was adept

That surely was enough.

A Scottish piper dwelt near by,

Whose one ungracious son

Beheld that pig and murmured: "Why,

No sooner said than done!

It seems to me that this I need."

And grasping it, with all his speed

Across the Pont des Invalides

He started on a run.

Then, turning sharply to the right,

Without a thought of risk,

He fled. 'Tis fair to call his flight

Inordinately brisk.

But now the town was all astir,

In vain his feet he strove to spur,

They caught him, shouting: "Au voleur!"

Beside the Obelisk.

The breathless butcher cried: "A mort!"

The crowd said: "Conspuez!"

And some: "A bas!" and half a score

Responded: "Vive l'armée!"

While grim gendarmes with piercing eye,

And stern remarks about: "Canaille!"

The pig abstracted on the sly.

Such is the Gallic way!

The piper's offspring, his defeat

Deep-rooted in his heart,

A revolutionary sheet

Proceeded then to start.

Thenceforward every evening he

In leaders scathed the Ministry,

And wished he could accomplish the

Return of Bonaparte.

The moral is that when the press

Begins to rave and shout

It's often difficult to guess

What it is all about.

The editor we strive to pin,

But we can never find him in.

What startling knowledge we should win

If we could find him out!

Though Mary had the kind of face

The rudest wind would softly blow on;

Though she was full of simple grace,

Sweet, amiable, and kind, and so on;

I would not have you