H.M.S. "PINAFORE"
This was the song:
The hours creep on apace,
My guilty heart is quaking;
Oh, that I might retrace
The step that I am taking!
Its folly it were easy to be showing;
What am I giving up, and whither going?
On the one hand, papa's luxurious home,
Hung with ancestral armour and old brasses,
Carved oak, and tapestry from distant Rome,
Rare "blue and white," Venetian finger glasses,
Rich oriental rugs and sofa pillows,
And everything that isn't old, from Gillows'
And, on the other, a dark dingy room
In some back street, with stuffy children crying,
Where organs yell and clacking housewives fume,
And clothes are hanging out all day a-drying:
With one cracked looking-glass to see your face in,
And dinner served up in a pudding basin.
Oh, god of Love and god of Reason—say
Which of you twain shall my poor heart obey?
But the two potentates, so pathetically appealed to, declined to undertake the responsibility of advising her. I expect they both thought that she was quite old enough to judge for herself.
Poor Josephine was greatly distracted at the ugly prospect of love in a back street that she had con-
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