The Wit of Women

As a female of very ambitious mind.

It had fretted her long and fretted her sore

To live in the rear of the grocery-store.

And several times she was heard to say

She would sell her soul for a year and a day

To the King of Brimstone, Fire, and Pitch,

For the power and pleasure of being rich.

Now her ambition had scope to work—

Riches, they say, are a burden at best;

Her onerous burden she did not shirk,

But carried it all with commendable zest;

Leaving her husband with nothing in life

But to smoke, eat, drink, and obey his wife.

She built a house with a double front-door,

A marble house in the modern style,

With silver planks in the entry floor,

And carpets of extra-magnificent pile.

And in the hall, in the usual manner,

“A statue,” she said, “of the chased Diana;

Though who it was chased her, or whether they

Caught her or not, she could, really, not say.”

A carriage with curtains of yellow satin—

A coat-of-arms with these rare devices:

“A mackerel sky and the starry Pisces—”

And underneath, in the purest fish-latin,

If fishibus flyabus

They may reach the skyabus!

Yet it was not in common affairs like these

She showed her original powers of mind;

Her soul was fired, her ardor inspired,

To stand apart from the rest of mankind;

“To be A No. one,” her husband said;

At which she turned very angrily red,

For she couldn’t endure the remotest hint

Of the grocery-store, and the mackerels in’t.

Weeks and months she plotted and planned

To raise herself from the common level;

Apart from even the few to stand

Who’d hundreds of thousands on which to revel.

Her genius, at last, spread forth its wings—

Stilts, golden stilts, are the very things—

“I’ll walk on stilts,” Mrs. Mackerel cried,

In the height of her overtowering pride.

Her husband timidly shook his head;

But she did not care—”For why,” as she said,

“Should the owner of more than a million pounds

Be going the rounds

On the very same grounds

As those low people, she couldn’t tell who,

They might keep a shop, for all she knew.”

She had a pair of the articles made,

Of solid gold, gorgeously overlaid