72
Star-spangled—most appropriate mordaunt—
Smiles blandly on the rag-clad scene
To think her dupes can be so verdant.
For th’ apparatus so constructed is
That whatsoever there eructed is
Shot down into that Holy of Holies
Is irrecoverable, as coal is
Shot from the truck into the cellar,
Or stars that fall from regions stellar.
In vain the twice-repentant sinner
Repents her of her vanished dinner.
Empty she crawls in tears away,
Feeling her goitres sag and play
About a neck no hair’s breadth slenderer
(Her throbbing prayers have made it tenderer).
Curses and vows she breathes in vain,
Pence Petrine don’t return again;
Already, long ere set of sun,
The capon and the priest are one.
But to return: a cretin bartered
Her services for some small pay,—
But rendered punctual to the day,—
Her juicy brain being just enlightened
Enough to find her purse strings tightened
In this world better than the burden
Bound on her hump by priests, the guerdon
Of their post-mortem paradise
To equipoise by this world’s sighs,
And for her gross, material way
Of thinking, had well nigh been martyred
By others of the goitrous clay,
Indignant she should thus aspire
