ocus.

How they love the flow'r of spring--
Never can resist it;
What a graceful little thing--
Bother, I have miss'd it!

Now the wind along the plain
Comes with roar and clatter--
There, my hat is off again!
Let it go--no matter.

What am I, to say thee nay
In thy rudest phases?
Blow my Sunday hat away.
Blow my hat to blazes.

'Tis but little we can do
For thy bounty's measure--
Sacrifice a hat or two?
Forty hats, with pleasure.

* * * * *

KENSINGTON GARDENS SMALL TALK.

_FROM THE RAILWAY IMPROVEMENT PHRASE-BOOK._

That Nursery-maid with the three children and the perambulator will
certainly get run over by the train if she stands there gossiping with
the man in the signal-box.

That is the nineteenth horse that has run away and thrown its rider
this morning, frightened by the smoke of the passing engine.

So it is not, after all, a tornado that has swept across the Gardens,
and rooted up all these trees, but merely the firm that has taken the
contract for the making of the new line.

Yes, there is no doubt that this wooden fence, stretching right across
the Gardens, relieved by overseers' moveable hatch-houses, puffing
steam-cranes, and processions of mud-carts, rather interfere with the
beauty and tranquillity of the place, but one must really bear in mind
_that it is, after all, only to last for live years._

Ha! I thought so! There go the whole of the water-fowl under that
luggage-train.

It is true, the Gardens are ruined, but one must not forget the
inestimable advantage to the shareholders of the public being able to
get from Paddington to Chelsea in a tunnel for twopence.

* * * * *

QUERY FOR NEXT ELECTION.--No man has a vote until he has attained his
majority. How about some districts where they are nearly all Miners?

* * * * *

MEN WHO HAVE TAKEN ME IN--TO DINNER.

(_BY A DINNER-BELLE._)

NO. II.--DON JUAN SENIOR.

To share with men the prandial gloom
Of union forced that fatal custom
Decrees to wither "youth and bloom,"
(The phrase is from _Sohrab and Rustum_)
I've suffered boredom to the full;
Professors dull--of Hindostani!
Dull wits, dull statesmen, dandies dull--
He wasn't dull--was Don GIOVANNI.

A widower _feted_ far and wide,
The jauntiest Rake who drinks the waters,
Smartest of "smart" vu