llustration: _This shows how the prince won the princess's heart,
And the end of her sleeping was simply a start._]

With torpor reprehensible,
Numb, comatose, insensible,
The flunkeys and the chamberlains all slumbered like the dead,
And snored so loud and mournfully,
That Charming passed them scornfully
And came to where a princess lay asleep upon a bed.
She was so extremely fair
That His Highness didn't care
For the risk, and so he kissed her ere a single word he spoke:--
In a jiffy maids and pages,
Ushers, lackeys, squires, and sages,
As fresh as if they'd been at least
A week awake,
Awoke,
And hastened, bustled, dashed and ran
Up stairways and through galleries:
In brief, they one and all began
Again to earn their salaries!

[Illustration]

Aroused from her paralysis,
As if in deep analysis
Of him who had awakened her, the princess met his eye:
Her glance at first was critical,
And sternly analytical.
And then she dropped her lashes and she gave a little sigh.
As he watched her, wholly dumb,
She observed: "You doubtless come
For one of two good reasons, and I'm going to ask you which.
Do you mean my house to harry,
Or do you propose to marry?"
He answered: "I may rue it,
But I'll do it,
If you're rich!"
The princess murmured with a smile:
"I've millions, at the least, to come!"
The prince cried: "Please excuse me, while
I go and get the priest to come!"

[Illustration]

_The Moral_: When affairs go ill
The sleeping partner foots the bill.

_How Jack Found that Beans May go Back on a Chap_

Without the slightest basis
For hypochondriasis
A widow had forebodings which a cloud around her flung,
And with expression cynical
For half the day a clinical
Thermometer she held beneath her tongue.

Whene'er she read the papers
She suffered from the vapors,
At every tale of malady or accident she'd groan;
In every new and smart disease,
From housemaid's knee to heart disease,
She recognized the symptoms as her own!

She had a yearning chronic
To try each novel tonic,
Elixir, panacea, lotion, opiate, and balm;
And from a homoeopathist
Would change to an hydropathist,
And back again, with stupefying calm!

[Illustration]

The closets of