l showing)
It never lets a second drop,
But simply keeps on going.

It tells me when I am to eat,
Which isn't necessary;
When food with me is obsolete,
I'll be a reliquary.

It tells me early when to rise,
And bother with _dejeuner_;
To sally forth and exercise,
And fill up my _porte-monnaie_.

I hear it talking in the night,
As if it were in clover:
You've never lost your appetite,
You've never been run over.

It makes me wish that I might live
More faithful unto duty,
And unto others something give
Like this bijou of beauty.

It holds its hands before its face,
So very modest is it;
So like the people in the place
Where I delight to visit.

Sometimes I wonder if it cries
The course I am pursuing;
Because it has so many I-s
And must know what I'm doing.

Sometimes I fear it makes me cry--
No matter, and no pity--
Afraid at last I'll have to die
In some far, foreign city.

It travels with me everywhere
And chirrups like a cricket;
As if it said with anxious air,
"Don't lose your tick-tick-ticket!"

Companion of my loneliness
Along my journey westward,
It never leaves me comfortless,
But has the last and best word.

I would not spoil its lovely face,
And so I go behind it,
And hold it like a china vase,
So careful when I wind it.

A clock is always excellent
That has its label on,
And proves a fine advertisement
For Waterbury, Conn.

Those Yankees--ah! they never shun
A chance to make a dime,
And counterfeit the very sun
In keeping "Standard Time."

Ah, well! the little clock has proved
The best of all bonanzas;
And thus my happy heart is moved
To these effusive stanzas.

Improvement.

Along the avenue I pass
Huge piles of wood and stone,
And glance at each amorphous mass,
Whose cumbrous weight has crushed the grass,
With half resentful groan.

Say I: "O labor, to despoil
Some lovely forest scene,
Or at the granite stratum toil,
And desecrate whole roods of soil,
Is vandal-like and mean!

"Than ever to disfigure thus
Our prairie garden-land,
Let me consort with Cerberus,
Be chained to crags precipitous,
Or seek an alien strand."