Lancashire;
Tush! to your talk of the rascals of Staffs;
Come, let me openly mention as rank a shire
(Yorks) as you'll find for the riffest of ruffs;
Choose all the pick of your Cheese-shire or Pork-shire men,
Men who have sunk in the deepest of mud;
Deuce of a one can come near to us Yorkshiremen
Born with Beelzebub's blue in our blood.

"Nuts" who have long left the strait way or narrow gate
Swarm on each side of the Swale or the Ouse;
Huddersfield vies in its villains with Harrogate;
Satan in Sheffield would shake in his shoes;
Hull?--though you might not be driven to drat it, you'd
Certainly substitute "e" for its "u,"
And, from a purely unprejudiced attitude,
We should pronounce it the worse of the two.

Yorks has a side, you see, surely more sinister
Far than the shires that would snatch at her fame;
So, when you curse at our present Prime Minister,
Calling him every conceivable name,
We shall accept 'em with sangfroid and phlegm, as he
Gives you this practical proof of his powers,
Setting his seal to our sinful supremacy,
Seeing he comes from this county of ours.

* * * * *

A FRUGAL MIND.

[Illustration: _Doctor._ "Well, Mr. McPhearson, I'm glad to see you out
again. You've had a long illness."

_McPhearson._ "Ay, Doctor, and varra expensive. I was wunnerin' if it
was worth while at ma time o' life."]

* * * * *

OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

(_By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks._)

I have reason to believe that Scotland Yard has on occasion displayed
considerable intelligence, and I regret that novelists will never allow
it to be as cunning even as myself in guessing the identity of the
villains of their criminal plots. Mrs. Charles Bryce, for instance,
might, without unduly taxing the imagination, have credited the Force
with the coup of bringing to justice the murderer of _Mrs. Vanderstein_,
but she went out of her way to employ that marvellous amateur, _Mr.
Gimblet_, for the purpose. I must believe that he was marvellous,
because she says so; but in this case he did nothing and had little
opportunity of justifying his references. He merely believed what he had
the luck to be told and caused the miscreant to be arrested when of his
own motion he practically offered himself for arrest. There are, after
all, two phases of crime--the first, its c