SHINGLE-SHORT
Missis’s knife, an’ wa’n’t she mad!
Didn’t much water her abuse,
An’ took my on’y knife I had,
Nice, dandy, new, horn-handled one;
’Cause, come to use her one, she found
’Twas gone too soft to cut a stick,
Too hard to turn a screw around:—
Use in it, yet it wa’n’t no use.
That’s me....!
My spirit’s all but broke
To wish myself like usual folk,
As does two right-out things in turn:—
Just earns to eat, an’ eats to earn.
A perfeck rose ’ll better please
Your eyesight than fat cabbages:
But good sound cabbage, I suppose,
Is pleasinger than canker’d rose?
Unless your eyes is in your nose.
Oh, ain’t there never no way out?
’Cause, see this extry use I got.
Quench as you will, that truth keeps hot.
My knife won’t cut, an’ yet I feel,
I do! it’s extry-proper steel;
An’ tons of iron ’s in my sand.
’Tain’t to make more, it’s on’y just
Joggle a bit, an’ readjust?
Couldn’t I be took back in hand,
Run down, an’ temper’d back again,
Or smelted out some patent way?
I wouldn’ mind no kind o’ pain,
So as my Power could get its play.
29
