I was a lawyer like Harmon Whitney Or Kinsey Keene or Garrison Standard, For I tried the rights of property, Although by lamp-light, for thirty years, In that poker room in the opera house. And I say to you that Life’s a gambler Head and shoulders above us all. No mayor alive can close the house. And if you lose, you can squeal as you will; You’ll not get back your money. He makes the percentage hard to conquer; He stacks the cards to catch your weakness And not to meet your strength. And he gives you seventy years to play: For if you cannot win in seventy You cannot win at all. So, if you lose, get out of the room— Get out of the room when your time is up. It’s mean to sit and fumble the cards And curse your losses, leaden-eyed, Whining to try and try. Roy Butler If the learned Supreme Court of Illinois Got at the secret of every case As well as it does a case of rape It would be the greatest court in the world. A jury, of neighbors mostly, with “Butch” Weldy As foreman, found me guilty in ten minutes And two ballots on a case like this: Richard Bandle and I had trouble over a fence And my wife and Mrs. Bandle quarreled As to whether Ipava was a finer town than Table Grove. I awoke one morning with the love of God Brimming over my heart, so I went to see Richard To settle the fence in the spirit of Jesus Christ. I knocked on the door, and his wife opened; She smiled and asked me in. I entered— She slammed the door and began to scream, “Take your hands off, you low down varlet!” Just then her husband entered. I waved my hands, choked up with words. He went for his gun, and I ran out. But neither the Supreme Court nor my wife Believed a word she said. Searcy Foote I wanted to go away to college But rich Aunt Persis wouldn’t help me. So I made gardens and raked the lawns And bought John Alden’s books with my earnings And toiled for the very means of life. I wanted to marry Delia Prickett, But how could I do it with what I earned? And there was Aunt Persis more than seventy Who sat in a wheel-chair half alive With her throat so paralyzed, when she swallowed The soup ran out of her mouth like a duck— A gourmand yet, investing her income In mortgages, fretting all the time About her notes and rents and papers. That day I was sawing wood for her, And reading Proudhon in between. I went in the house for a drink of water, And there she sat asleep in her chair, And Proudhon lying on the table, And a bottle of chloroform on the book, She used sometimes for an aching tooth! I poured the chloroform on a handkerchief And held it to her nose till she died.— Oh Delia, Delia, you and Proudhon Steadied my hand, and the coroner Said she died of heart failure. I married Delia and got the money— A joke on you, Spoon River? Edmund Pollard