With many a hackneyed wile,
With ungrammatical lips,
And corns that mar her trips!

Hung from the "flies" in air,
She acts a palpable lie,
She's as little a fairy there
As unpoetical I!
I hear you asking, Why--
Why in the world I sing
This tawdry, tinselled thing?

No airy fairy she,
As she hangs in arsenic green,
From a highly impossible tree,
In a highly impossible scene
(Herself not over clean).
For fays don't suffer, I'm told,
From bunions, coughs, or cold.

And stately dames that bring
Their daughters there to see,
Pronounce the "dancing thing"
No better than she should be.
With her skirt at her shameful knee,
And her painted, tainted phiz:
Ah, matron, which of us is?

(And, in sooth, it oft occurs
That while these matrons sigh,
Their dresses are lower than hers,
And sometimes half as high;
And their hair is hair they buy,
And they use their glasses, too,
In a way she'd blush to do.)

But change her gold and green
For a coarse merino gown,
And see her upon the scene
Of her home, when coaxing down
Her drunken father's frown,
In his squalid, cheerless den:
She's a fairy truly, then!

THE SENSATION CAPTAIN.

No nobler captain ever trod
Than Captain Parklebury Todd,
So good--so wise--so brave, he!
But still, as all his friends would own,
He had one folly--one alone--
This Captain in the Navy.

I do not think I ever knew
A man so wholly given to
Creating a sensation;
Or p'r'aps I should in justice say--
To what in an Adelphi play
Is known as "Situation."

He passed his time designing traps
To flurry unsuspicious chaps--
The taste was his innately--
He couldn't walk into a room
Without ejaculating "Boom!"
Which startled ladies greatly.

He'd wear a mask and muffling cloak,
Not, you will understand, in joke,
As some assume disguises.
He did it, actuated by
A simple love of mystery
And fondness for surprises.

I need not say he loved a maid--
His eloquence threw into shade
All others who adored her:
The maid, though pleased at first, I know,
Found, after several years or so,
Her startling lover bored her.

So, when his orders came to sail,
She did not faint or scream or wail,
Or with her tears anoint him.
She shook his hand, and said "Good-bye;"
With laughter dancing in h