While the gems on the lady’s flying skirts
Gave out their light in jets and spirts.
Poor Mackerel gazed in mute dismay
At this unprecedented display.
“Oh, stop, love, stop!” he cried at last;
But she only flew more wild and fast,
While the flutes and fiddles, bugle and drum,
Followed as if their time had come.
She went at such a bewildering pace
Nobody saw the lady’s face,
But only a ring of emerald light
From the crown she wore on that fatal night.
Whether the stilts were propelling her,
Or she the stilts, none could aver.
Around and around the magnificent hall
Mrs. Mackerel danced at her own grand ball.
“As the twig is bent the tree’s inclined;”
This must have been a case in kind.
“What’s in the blood will sometimes show—”
‘Round and around the wild stilts go.
It had been whispered many a time
That when poor Mack was in his prime
Keeping that little retail store,
He had fallen in love with a ballet-girl,
Who gave up fame’s entrancing whirl
To be his own, and the world’s no more.
She made him a faithful, prudent wife—
Ambitious, however, all her life.
Could it be that the soft, alluring waltz
Had carried her back to a former age,
Making her memory play her false,
Till she dreamed herself on the gaudy stage?
Her crown a tinsel crown—her guests
The pit that gazes with praise and jests?
“Pride,” they say, “must have a fall—”
Mrs. Mackerel was very proud—
And now she danced at her own grand ball,
While the music swelled more fast and loud.
The gazers shuddered with mute affright,
For the stilts burned now with a bluish light,
While a glimmering, phosphorescent glow
Did out of the lady’s garments flow.
And what was that very peculiar smell?
Fish, or brimstone? no one could tell.
Stronger and stronger the odor grew,
And the stilts and the lady burned more blue;
‘Round and around the long saloon,
While Mackerel gazed in a partial swoon,
She approached the throng, or circled from it,
With a flaming train like the last great comet;
Till at length the crowd
All groaned aloud.
For her exit she made from her own grand ball
Out of the window, stilts and all.
None of the guests can really say
