Could I e’er but grow up, I’d be off For a week to make love with my wheedles; If the tight little Boy at the Nore Could but catch a nice girl at the Needles, We’d have _two_ at the Nore! They thinks little of sizes on water, On big waves the tiny one skulks,-- While the river has Men of War on it-- Yes--the Thames is oppress’d with great Hulks, And the Boy’s at the Nore! But I’ve done--for the water is heaving Round my body, as though it would sink it! And I’ve been so long pitching and tossing, That sea-sick--you’d hardly now think it-- Is the Boy at the Nore! [Illustration: AS SAFE AS THE BANK.] [1] A word caught from some American Trader in passing. THE RUN-OVER. “DO you see that ’ere gentleman in the buggy, with the clipt un?” enquired Ned Stocker, as he pointed with his whip at a chaise, some fifty yards in advance. “Well, for all he’s driving there so easy like, and comfortable, he once had a gig-shaft, and that’s a fact, driv right through his body!” “Rather him than me,” drawled a passenger on the box, without removing his cigar from his mouth. “It’s true for all that,” returned Ned, with a nod of his head equal to an affidavit. “The shaft run in under one armpit, right up to the tug, and out again at t’other besides pinning him to the wall of the stable--and that’s a thing such as don’t happen every day.” “Lucky it don’t,” said the smoker, between two puffs of his cigar. “It an’t likely to come often,” resumed Ned, “let alone the getting over it afterwards, which is the wonderfullest part of it all. To see him bowling along there, he don’t look like a man pinned to a stable-wall with the rod through him, right up to the tug--do he?” “Can’t say he does,” said the smoker. “For my part,” said Ned, “or indeed any man’s part, most people in such a case would have said, it’s all up with me, and good reason why, as I said afore, with a shaft clean through your inside, right up to the tug--and two inches besides into the stable wall, by way of a benefit. But somehow he always stuck to it--not the wall, you know--but his own opinion, that he should get over it--he was as firm as flints about that--and sure enough the event came off exactly.” “The better for him,” said the smoker. “I don’t know the rights on it,” said Ned, “for I warn’t there--but they do say when he was dextricated from the rod, there was a regular tunnel through him, and in course the greatest danger was of his ketching cold in the lungs from the thorough draught.” “Nothing more likely,” said the fumigator.