=Dear Captain Bill=—Will you please tell me what is a Nymph?—=Farmer Boy.= A Nymph, my boy, is a hasher with a good form who gets a job in a bathing girls’ show exhibiting her Prowess. * * * * * Democratic as he is, even the bootlegger treats his friend, the cop, from the bottle reserved “For Officers Only.” _Limber Kicks_ _Of sweethearts she has quite a few,_ _They come from near and far;_ _But the sailor who comes there each night_ _She calls her evening’s tar._ * * * * * “Won’t you step into the parlor?” Said the spider to the fly. “You bet your life I’ll not,” she said. And winked her other eye. “You must think I’m easy, And that you are very sly, No knock-out drops in mine, sir, For I’m a Spanish fly.” * * * * * Mary had a little lamb, A joyous, youthful mutton; And when they played at parlor games ’Twas Mary got the butt’n. * * * * * Little Mary had a monkey On a painted stick, She sucked the paint all off one day, It made poor Mary sick. * * * * * The boy sat on the moon-lit deck, His head was in a whirl; His eyes and mouth were full of hair, And his arms were full of girl. _Whiz Bang Editorials_ “_The Bull is Mightier Than the Bullet_” “Life is a jest and all things show it; I thought so once but now I know it,” is Gay’s gloomy epitaph in Westminster Abbey. Did he receive this impression when he walked the streets of London? In his poem, “Trivia,” he tells us how to walk the streets, what to wear, the good people to address, the industrious ones to encourage, and the bad folks to pass by. Poe, in his “Man in the Crowd,” writes of the mass of people, and of beggar, tramp and peddler; of the modest, pretty girl; of the women of the town like the statue in Lucian “with a surface of Parian marble and with interior filled with filth”; and of a man who walked all the crowded streets of London to get away from himself. De Quincy visits the Strand and says: “There one feels like a single wave in the total Atlantic—like one plant in the forest of America.” The loneliness of his heart oppresses him among the crowd of unending faces which have no friendly word for him, and he stands “among hurrying figures of men weaving to and fro, seeming like a masque of maniacs or a pageant of phantoms.” Stand on the corners, walk the streets of our own big cities, the capitals of the Old World, or far-away countries, and behold the extremes of work and idleness, vice and virtue, sickness and health, innocent mirth and mad amusement. The people follow each other like the waves of a storm-tossed sea, and long after you have returned to your room their walking, talking, laughing and crying comes to you like the sad moan of the sea trying to be at peace.