The hippopotamus came;
He sat upon my chest:
The hippopotamus roared "I'll spot him!" as
He trampled upon my breast.

The big iguanodon hunched
And rooted in under me:
The big iguanodon raised by that pan o' done
Overdone eggs for tea.

The ichthyosaurus tried
To roll me up in a ball;
While all the three were grinning at me,
And pounding me, bed and all.

Hip! hip! hurrah!
It was a little black pig,
And a big bull-frog, and a bobtailed dog--
All of them dancing a jig.

And oh, the snakes! the snakes!
And the boa constrictor too!
And the cobra capello--a terrible fellow--
Came to my horrified view.

Snakes and horrible beasts,
Frog, pig, and dog
Hustled me, pushed me, tickled me, crushed me,
Rolled me about like a log.

The little blue devils came on;
They rode on a needle's point;
And the big giraffe, with asthmatic laugh,
And legs all out of joint.

Bats crawled into my ears,
Hopping about in my brain;
And grizzly bears rode up on mares,
And then rode down again.

An antediluvian roared,
In the form of a Brahmin bull;
And a Patagonian squeezed an onion,
Filling my aching eyes full.

The three blue bottles that sat
Upon the historical stones
Sang, "Hey diddle diddle"--two on a fiddle,
The other one on the bones.

"Whoo! whoo! whoo!
Get up, get up, you beauty!
Here come the shaved monkeys, a-ridlng on donkeys,
Fresh from Bobberty Shooty."

They raised me up in the air,
Bed, body, and all,
And carried me soon to the man in the moon,
At the siege of Sebastopol.

Down, down, down,
Round, round, round,
A whirlpool hurled me out of the world,
And on, no bottom I found.

Down, down, down,
Whirl, whirl, whirl,
And the Florentine boar was pacing the shore,
His tail all out of curl.

He smoked my favorite pipe,
He blew a cloud of smoke,
He pulled me out with his porcine snout,
And hugging him, I awoke.

"Why, Dick," cried the Senator, "what precious nonsense!"

"It was intended to be so," said Dick.

"Well, but you might as well put on an _idee_. It must have some
meaning."

"Not a bit of it. It has no meaning; that is, no more than a dream
or a nightmare."

The Senator now began to discuss the nature of poetry, but was
suddenly interrupted by a shout--

"The Temples!"

The country about Paestum i