Billy--where are you, Billy?--I’m as hoarse as a crow, with screaming for ye, you young sorrow! And shan’t have half a voice, no more I shan’t, for crying fresh herrings to-morrow. Oh Billy, you’re bursting my heart in two, and my life won’t be of no more vally, If I’m to see other folks’ darlins, and none of mine, playing like angels in our alley. And what shall I do but cry out my eyes, when I looks at the old three-legged chair As Billy used to make coach and horses of, and there an’t no Billy there! I would run all the wide world over to find him, if I only know’d where to run, Little Murphy, now I remember, was once lost for a month through stealing a penny bun,-- The Lord forbid of any child of mine! I think it would kill me raily To find my Bill holdin’ up his little innocent hand at the Old Bailey. For though I say it as oughtn’t, yet I will say, you may search for miles and mileses And not find one better brought up, and more pretty behaved, from one end to t’other of St. Giles’s. And if I call’d him a beauty, it’s no lie, but only as a Mother ought to speak; You never set eyes on a more handsomer face, only it hasn’t been wash’d for a week; As for hair, tho’ it’s red, it’s the most nicest hair when I’ve time to just show it the comb; I’ll owe ’em five pounds, and a blessing besides, as will only bring him safe and sound home. He’s blue eyes, and not to be call’d a squint, though a little cast he’s certainly got; And his nose is still a good un, tho’ the bridge is broke, by his falling on a pewter pint pot; He’s got the most elegant wide mouth in the world, and very large teeth for his age; And quite as fit as Mrs. Murdockson’s child to play Cupid on the Drury Lane Stage. And then he has got such dear winning ways--but oh I never never shall see him no more! O dear! to think of losing him just after nursing him back from death’s door! Only the very last month when the windfalls, hang ’em, was at twenty a penny! And the threepence he’d got by grottoing was spent in plums, and sixty for a child is too many. And the Cholera man came and whitewash’d us all and, drat him, made a seize of our hog. It’s no use to send the Crier to cry him about, he’s such a blunderin’ drunken old dog; The last time he was fetch’d to find a lost child, he was guzzling with his bell at the Crown, And went and cried a boy instead of a girl, for a distracted Mother and Father about Town. Billy--where are you, Billy, I say? come Billy, come home, to your best of Mothers! I’m scared when I think of them Cabroleys, they drive so, they’d run over their own Sisters and Brothers. Or may be he’s stole by some chimbly sweeping wretch, to stick fast in narrow flues and what not,