“The cupboard was bare!” It was bare! There were to be found neither apples, nor oranges, nor cheesecakes, nor penny buns, nor gingerbread, nor crackers, nor nuts, nor lucifer matches. The cupboard was bare! There was but one, only one solitary cupboard in the whole of the cottage, and that one, the sole hope of the widow, and the glorious loadstar of the poor dog, was bare! Had there been a leg of mutton, a loin of lamb, a fillet of veal, even an ice from Gunter’s, the case would have been very different, the incident would have been otherwise. But it was bare, my brethren, bare as a bald head. Many of you will probably say, with all the pride of worldly sophistry――“The widow, no doubt, went out and bought a dog biscuit.” Ah, no! Far removed from these earthly ideas and mundane desires, poor Mother Hubbard, the widow, whom many thoughtless worldlings would despise, in that she only owned one cupboard, perceived――or I might even say saw――at once the relentless logic of the situation, and yielded to it with all the heroism of that nature which had enabled her, without deviation, to reach the barren cupboard. She did not attempt, like the stiff-necked scoffers of this generation, to war against the inevitable; she did not try, like the so-called man of science, to explain what she did not understand. She did nothing. “The poor dog had none.” And then at this point our information ceases. But do we not know sufficient? Are we not cognisant of enough? Who would dare to pierce the veil that shrouds the ulterior fate of Old Mother Hubbard――her poor dog――the cupboard――or the bone that was not there? Must we imagine her still standing at the open cupboard door, depict to ourselves the dog still drooping his disappointed tail upon the floor, the sought-for bone remaining somewhere else? Ah, no, my brethren, we are not so permitted to attempt to read the future. Suffice it for us to glean from this beautiful story its many lessons; suffice it for us to apply them, to study them as far as in us lies, and, bearing in mind the natural frailty of our nature, to avoid being widows; to shun the patronymic of Hubbard; to have, if our means afford it, more than one cupboard in the house; and to keep stores in them all. And oh! dear friends, keep in recollection what we have learned this day. Let us avoid keeping dogs that are fond of bones. But, brethren, if we do, if fate has ordained that we should do any of these things, let us then go, as Mother Hubbard did, straight, without curvetting and prancing, to our cupboard, empty though it be,――let us, like her, accept the inevitable with calm steadfastness; and should we, like her, ever be left with a hungry dog and an empty cupboard, may future chroniclers be able to write also in the beautiful words of our text―― “And so the poor dog had none.” _Notes and Queries_, April 21, 1888, contained the following interesting account of the origin of this singular jeu d’esprit: