do but write,
While I sets by to inspire.
“We’ll make it hot all round, bedad!”
And his laughture was loud and free.
“The devil!” cried Pixley, surpassin’ mad.
“Exactly, my friend—that’s me.”
So he took a chair and a feather fan,
And he sets and sets and sets,
Inspirin’ that humbled editor man,
Which sweats and sweats and sweats!
All unavailin’ his struggles be,
And it’s, O, a weepin’ sight
To see a great editor, bold and free,
Reducted to sech a plight!
“Black Bart, Po8”
Welcome, good friend; as you have served your term,
And found the joy of crime to be a fiction,
I hope you’ll hold your present faith, stand firm
And not again be open to conviction.
Your sins, though scarlet once, are now as wool:
You’ve made atonement for all past offenses,
And conjugated—’twas an awful pull!—
The verb “to pay” in all its moods and tenses.
You were a dreadful criminal—by Heaven,
I think there never was a man so sinful!
We’ve all a pinch or two of Satan’s leaven,
But you appeared to have an even skinful.
Earth shuddered with aversion at your name;
Rivers fled backward, gravitation scorning;
The sea and sky, from thinking on your shame,
Grew lobster-red at eve and in the morning.
But still red-handed at your horrid trade
You wrought, to reason deaf, and to compassion.
But now with gods and men your peace is made
I beg you to be good and in the fashion.
What’s that?—you “ne’er again will rob a stage”?
What! did you do so? Faith, I didn’t know it.
Was that what threw poor Themis in a rage?
I thought you were convicted as a poet!
I own it was a comfort to my soul,
And soothed it better than the deepest curses,
To think they’d put one poet in a hole
Where, though he wrote, he could not print his verses.
I thought that Welcker, Stuart, Brooks and all
The ghastly crew who always are begriming
With villain couplets every page and wall,
Might be arrested and “run in” for rhyming.
And then Parnassus would be left to me,
And Pegasus should bear me up it gaily,
Nor down a steep place run into the sea,
As now he must be tempted to do daily.
Well, grab the lyre-strings, hearties, and begin:
Bawl your harsh souls all out upon the gravel.
I must endure you, for you’ll never sin
By robbing coaches, until dead men travel.
A “Scion of Nobility”
Come, sisters, weep!—our Baron dear,
Alas! has run away.
If always we had kept him here
He had not gone astray.
Painter and grainer it were vain
To say he was, before;
And if he were, yet ne’er again
He’ll darken here a door.
We mourn each matrimonial plan—
Even tradesmen join the cry:
He was so promising a man
Whenever he did buy.
He was a fascinating lad,
Deny it all who may;
Even “moneyed” men confess he had
A very taking way.
So from our tables he is gone—
Our tears descend in showers;
We loved the very fat upon
His kidneys, for ’twas ours.
To women he was all respect
To duns as cold as ice;
No lady could his suit reject,
No tailor get its price.
He raised our hope above the sky;
Alas! alack! and O!
That one who worked it up so high
Should play it down so slow.
The Night of Election
“O venerable patriot, I pray
Stand not here coatless; at the break of day
We’ll know the grand result—and even now
The eastern sky is faintly touched with gray.
“It ill befits thine age’s hoary crown—
This rude environment of rogue and clown,
Who, as the lying bulletins appear,
With drunken cries incarnadine the town.
“But if with noble zeal you stay to note
The outcome of your patriotic vote
For Blaine, or Cleveland, and your native land,
Take—and God bless you!—take my overcoat.”
“Done, pard—it’s mighty white of you. And now
I guess the country’ll keep the trail somehow.
I ain’t allowed to vote, the Warden said,
But whacked my coat up on old Stanislow.”
The Convicts’ Ball
San Quentin was brilliant. Within the halls
Of the noble pile with the frowning walls
(God knows they’ve enough to make them frown,
With a Governor trying to break them down!)
Was a blaze of light. ’Twas the natal day
Of his nibs the popular John S. Gray.
“The ball is free!” cried Black Bart, and they all
Said a ball with no chain was a novel ball;
“And I never have seed,” said Jimmy Hope,
“Sech a lightsome dance withouten a rope.”
Chinamen, Indians, Portuguese, Blacks,
Russians, Italians, Kanucks and Kanaks,
Chilenos, Peruvians, Mexicans—all
Greased with their presence that notable ball.
None were excluded excepting, perhaps,
The Rev. Morrison’s churchly chaps,
Whom, to prevent a religious debate,
The Warden had banished outside of the gate.
The fiddler, fiddling his hardest the while,
“Called off” in the regular foot-hill style:
“Circle to the left!” and “Forward and back!”
And “Hellum to port for the stabbard tack!”
(This great virtuoso, it would appear,
Was Mate of the Gatherer many a year.)
“Ally man left!”—to a painful degree
His French was unlike to the French of Paree,
As heard from our countrymen lately abroad,
And his “doe cee doe” was the gem of the fraud.
But what can you hope from a gentleman barred
From circles of culture by dogs in the yard?
’Twas a glorious dance, though, all the same:
The Jardin Mabille in the days of its fame
Never saw legs perform such springs—
The cold-chisel’s magic had given them wings.
They footed it featly, those lades and gents:
Dull care (said Long Moll) had a helly go-hence!
’Twas a very aristocratic affair:
The crème de la crème of the place was there—
The swells and belles of our toughest sets,
And Hubert Howe Bancroft sent his regrets.
A Prayer
Sweet Spirit of Cesspool, hear a mother’s prayer:
Her terrors pacify and offspring spare!
Upon Silurians alone let fall
(And God in Heaven have mercy on them all!)
The red revenges of your fragrant breath,
Hot with the flames invisible of death.
Sing in each nose a melody of smells,
And lead them snoutwise to their several hells!
To One Detested
Sir, you’re a veteran, revealed
In history and fable
As warrior since you took the field,
Defeating Abel.
As Commissary later (or
If not, in every
