“Starn all!” echoed Ben, with a movement aback, But too slow to escape from the creature’s attack; If flippers it had, they were furnish’d with nails,-- “You willin, I’ll teach you that Women an’t Whales!” “Avast!” shouted Ben, with a sort of a screech, “I’ve heard a Whale spouting, but _here_ is a speech!” “A-spouting, indeed!--very pretty,” said she; “But it’s you I’ll blow up, not the froth of the sea! “To go to pretend to take _me_ for a fish! You great Polar Bear--but I know what you wish-- You’re sick of a wife, that your hankering baulks,-- You want to go back to some young Esquimax!” “O dearest,” cried Ben, frighten’d out of his life, “Don’t think I would go for to murder a wife I must long have bewailed”--“But she only cried Stuff! Don’t name it, you brute, you’ve _be-whaled_ me enough!” “Lord, Polly!” said Ben, “such a deed could I do? I’d rather have murder’d all Wapping than you! Come, forgive what is passed.” “O you monster!” she cried, “It was none of your fault that it passed of one side!” However, at last she inclined to forgive; “But, Ben, take this warning as long as you live-- If the love of harpooning so strong must prevail, Take a whale for a wife, not a wife for a whale.” SALLY SIMPKIN’S LAMENT; OR, JOHN JONES’S KIT-CAT-ASTROPHE. “He left his body to the sea, And made a shark his legatee.” BRYAN AND PERENNE. “Oh! what is that comes gliding in, And quite in middling haste? It is the picture of my Jones, And painted to the waist. “It is not painted to the life, For where’s the trowsers blue? Oh Jones, my dear!--oh dear! my Jones, What is become of you?” “Oh! Sally dear, it is too true,-- The half that you remark Is come to say my other half Is bit off by a shark! “Oh! Sally, sharks do things by halves, Yet most completely do! A bite in one place seems enough, But I’ve been bit in two. “You know I once was all your own, But now a shark must share! But let that pass--for now to you I’m neither here nor there. “Alas! death has a strange divorce Effected in the sea, It has divided me from you, And even me from me! “Don’t fear my ghost will walk o’nights To haunt, as people say; My ghost _can’t_ walk, for, oh! my legs Are many leagues away! “Lord! think, when I am swimming round, And looking where the boat is, A shark just snaps away a _half_, Without ‘a _quarter’s_ notice.’ “One half is here, the other half Is near Columbia placed; Oh! Sally, I have got the whole Atlantic for my waist. “But now, adieu--a long adieu! I’ve solved death’s awful riddle, And would say more, but I am doomed To break off in the middle!” I’M GOING TO BOMBAY. “Nothing venture, nothing have.”--OLD PROVERB.