re to unriddle the enigma
In the "rags" of rival towns was made a byword and a scoff,
Till each soul in the community felt branded with the stigma
Of the unexplained suspicion of poor Biggs's taking off.

So a dozen of us rose and swore this thing should be no longer:
Though the means that Nature furnished had been tried without
result,
There were forces supersensual that higher were and stronger,
And with consentaneous clamour we pronounced for the occult.

Then Joe Thomson slung a tenner, and Jack Robinson a tanner,
And each according to his means respectively disbursed;
And a letter in your humble servant's most seductive manner
Was despatched to Sludge the Medium, recently of Darlinghurst.

II.

"I am Biggs," the spirit said ('twas through the medium's lips he
said it;
But the voice that spoke, the accent, too, were Biggs's very own,
Be it, therefore, not set down to our unmerited discredit,
That collectively we sickened as we recognised the tone).

"From a saurian interior, Christian friends, I now address you"--
(And "Oh heaven!" or its correlative, groaned shuddering we)--
"While there yet remains a scrap of my identity, for, bless you,
This ungodly alligator's fast assimilating me.

"For although through nine abysmal days I've fought with his
digestion,
Being hostile to his processes and loth to pulpify,
It is rapidly becoming a most complicated question
How much of me is crocodile, how much of him is I.

"And, Oh, my friends, 'tis sorrow's crown of sorrow to remember
That this sacrilegious reptile owed me nought but gratitude,
For I bought him from a showman twenty years since come November,
And I dropped him in the river for his own and others' good.

"It had grieved me that the spouses of our townsmen, and their
daughters,
Should be shocked by river bathers and their indecorous ways,
So I cast my bread, that is, my alligator, on the waters,
And I found it, in a credit balance, after many days.

"Years I waited, but at last there came the rumour long-expected,
And the out-of-door ablutionists forsook their wicked paths,
And the issues of my handiwork divinely were directed
In a constant flow of custom to the Corporation Baths.

"'Twas a weakling when I bought it; 'twas so young that you could
pet it;
But with all its disadvantages I reckoned it would do;
And it did: Oh, lay the moral well to heart and don't