of the tireless hound.
Faith! to your ear it is no nightingale.
What signifies the date upon a stone?
To-morrow you shall die if not to-day.
What matter when the Avenger choose to slay?
Or soon or late the Devil gets his own.
Thenceforth through all eternity you’ll hold
No one advantage of the later death.
Though you had granted Ralph another breath
Would he to-day less silent lie and cold?
Earth cares not, curst assassin, when you die;
You never will be readier than now.
Wear, in God’s name, that mark upon your brow,
And keep the life you purchased with a lie!
One Judge
Wallace, created on a noble plan
To show us that a Judge can be a Man;
Through moral mire exhaling mortal stench
God-guided sweet and foot-clean to the Bench;
In salutation here and sign I lift
A hand as free as yours from lawless thrift,
A heart—ah, would I truly could proclaim
My bosom lighted with so pure a flame!
Alas, not love of justice moves my pen
To praise, or to condemn, my fellow men.
Good will and ill its busy point incite:
I do but gratify them when I write.
In palliation, though, I’d humbly state,
I love the righteous and the wicked hate.
So, sir, although we differ we agree,
Our work alike from persecution free,
And Heaven, approving you, consents to me.
Take, therefore, from this not all useless hand
The crown of honor—not in all the land
One honest man dissenting from the choice,
Nor in approval one Fred Crocker’s voice!
An Obituarian
A newspaper Death-poet sat at his desk,
Wrapped in appropriate gloom;
His posture was pensive and picturesque,
Like a raven charming a tomb.
Enter a party a-drinking the cup
Of sorrow—and likewise of woe:
“Some harrowing poetry, Mister, whack up,
All wrote in the key of O.
“For the angels have called my old woman hence
From the strife—where she fit mighty free.
It’s a nickel a line? Cond⸺n the expense!
For wealth is now little to me.”
The Bard of Mortality looked him through
In the piercingest sort of a way:
“It is much to me though it’s little to you—
I’ve taken a wife to-day.”
So he twisted the tail of his mental cow
And made her give down her flow.
The grief of that bard was long-winded, somehow—
There was reams and reamses of woe.
The widower man which had buried his wife
Grew lily-like round each gill,
For she turned in her grave and came back to life!
Then he cruel ignored the bill.
Then Sorrow she opened her gates a-wide,
As likewise did also Woe,
And the death-poet’s song, as is heard inside,
Is sang in the key of O.
A Commuted Sentence
Boruck and Waterman upon their grills
In Hades lay, with many a sigh and groan,
Hotly disputing, for each swore his own
Were clearly keener than the other’s ills.
And, truly, each had much to boast of—bone
And sinew, muscle, tallow, nerve and skin,
Blood in the vein and marrow in the shin,
Teeth, eyes and other organs (for the soul
Has all of these and even a wagging chin)
All Blazed and coruscated like a coal!
For Lower Sacramento, you remember,
Has trying weather, even in mid-December.
Now this occurred in the far future. All
Mankind had been a million ages dead,
And each to her reward above had sped,
Each to his punishment below—I call
That quite a just arrangement. As I said,
Boruck and Waterman in warmest pain
Crackled and sizzed with all their might and main.
For, when on earth, they’d freed a scurvy host
Of crooks from the State prison, who again
Had robbed and ravaged the Pacific Coast
And (such the felon’s predatory nature)
Even got themselves into the Legislature.
So Waterman and Boruck lay and roared
In Hades. It is true all other males
Felt the like flames and uttered equal wails,
But did not suffer them; whereas they bored
Each one the other. But indeed my tale’s
Not getting on at all. They lay and browned
Till Boruck (who long since his teeth had ground
Away and spoke Gum Arabic and made
Stump speeches even in praying) looked around
And said to Bob’s incinerated shade:
“Your Excellency, this is mighty hard on
The inventors of the unpardonable pardon.”
The other soul—his right hand all aflame,
For ’twas with that he’d chiefly sinned, although
His tongue, too, like a wick was working woe
To the reserve of tallow in his frame—
Said, with a sputtering, uncertain flow,
And with a gesture like a shaken torch:
“Yes, but I’m sure we’ll not much longer scorch.
Although this climate is not good for Hope,
Whose joyous wing ’twould singe, I think the porch
Of Hell we’ll quit with a pacific slope.
Last century I signified repentance
And asked for commutation of our sentence.”
Even as he spoke, the form of Satan loomed
In sight, all crimson with reflection’s fire,
Like some tall tower or cathedral spire
Touched by the dawn while all the earth is gloomed
In mists and shadows of the night time. “Sire,”
Said Waterman, his agitable wick
Still sputtering, “what calls you back so quick?
It scarcely was a century ago
You left us.” “I have come to bring,” said Nick,
“St. Peter’s answer (he is never slow
In correspondence) to your application
For pardon—pardon me!—for commutation.
“He says that he’s instructed to reply
(And he has so instructed me) that sin
Like yours—and this poor gentleman’s who’s in
For bad advice to you—comes rather high;
But since, apparently, you both begin
To feel some pious promptings to the right,
And fain would turn your faces to the light,
Eternity seems all too long a term.
So ’tis commuted to one-half. I’m quite
Prepared, when that expires, to free the worm
And quench the fire.” And, civilly retreating,
He left them holding their protracted meeting.
What! you whip rascals?—you, whose gutter blood
Bears, in its dark, dishonorable flood,
Enough of prison-birds’ prolific germs
To serve a whole eternity of terms?
You, for whose back the rods and cudgels strove
Ere yet the ax had hewn them from the grove?
You, the De Young whose splendor bright and brave
Is phosphorescence from another’s grave—
Till now unknown, by any chance or luck,
Even to
