Off! at the neck and wristband! Off!--and laid on the bed! And she of the sweet white kist band Is the one whom I chose to wed. Off! the two pearl-white buttons! And yet it is laid out there (To return, as it were, to our muttons), The shirt I am going to wear. I list to the bells’ sweet chiming, In the still of the Sabbath morn, And I ask myself, in rhyming, How a buttonless shirt is worn. Shall I put myself in a passion, And curse the unwifely act, Or--which isn’t a poet’s fashion-- Behave with a little tact? Shall I show her the shirt and scold her, My scarcely a month-wed wife, Or wait till our union’s older, For the frown and the wordy strife? Ah! soul of my soul, my darling, No buttonless shirt shall rise To set the old Adam snarling At his Eve in their Paradise. Are we twain made one to wrangle, That the wifely way’s unlearnt, That a shirt has gone wrong in the mangle Or a handkerchief’s badly burnt? No; never shall wrath be blighting The beautiful bliss that buds, And I’ll fasten--your love requiting-- My buttonless shirt with studs. The Londoner to His Love. (SONG AND DANCE.) (_N.B.--This American song and dance can only be performed on the production of a certificate of lunacy signed by three members of the London County Council._) Oh, come, my love, where the fog lies thick, Down in the shadow where the microbes grow; We shall catch Na Nonna if we’re only quick, Down in the shadow where the microbes grow; For our bower is built on London clay, Where the gray mist hangs from the dawn of day, And the gay young germs of neuralgia play Down in the shadow where the microbes grow. Oh, come, my love, where the sun ne’er smirks, Down in the shadow where the microbes grow; To the wild wet waste where consumption lurks-- Down in the shadow where the microbes grow. Where the cough makes music, and the bronchial wheeze Replies to the echo of the sniff and sneeze, And asthma flirts with the cut-throat breeze, Down in the shadow where the microbes grow. Oh, come, my love, and abide with me, Down in the shadow where the microbes grow; Where the weathercock always points N.E., Down in the shadow where the microbes grow; Where the damp drips dank down the dismal wall, And the fungi flourish in the mildewed hall, And the undertaker is the lord of all, Down in the shadow where the microbes grow. The Eiffel Bonnet. Behind an Eiffel bonnet I sat one matinée, And, oh, the feathers on it Completely hid the play, Because that Eiffel bonnet Kept bobbing in my way.