My country, beauteous land! I'll sing, if you will stand, a song to thee! My harp is rather coarse, my voice is somewhat hoarse, yet will I try to force some melody. Fair land that saw my birth, gem of the whole blamed earth, hark to my screeds! Tell me, O tell me why prices have soared so high that man can scarcely buy things that he needs. Things that a man must eat--lemons and prunes and meat--cost like Sam Hill; carpets and rugs and mats, neckties and shoes and hats, shirting to hide his slats, empty his till. All through the week I work, like an unlaundered Turk, for a few bucks; no odds how hard I try, of wealth I'm always shy, and when I travel I ride on the trucks. They say that half a plunk bought more and better junk, in the old days, than will two bones or more, in the big modern store, since prices learned to soar, five hundred ways. My country, hear my word! You are a hummingbird, also a peach! Splendid in peace and war, thou most effulgent star--tell me why prices are clear out of reach! _The Yellow Cord_ When a tiresome Chinese statesman bores his queen or overlord, he receives a little package that contains a yellow cord; and the statesman realizes that it is no use to roar, so he hangs himself in silence to the nearest sycamore. Let us borrow from the wisdom of the rulers of Cathay! Let us put this grand old custom into common use today! Let the President distribute samples of the saffron string, to the statesmen who have bored us since the early days of spring, with their figures and statistics and their buncombe and hot air, and their misfit oratory which won't lead us anywhere. We might all, perhaps, be rescued, from an ordeal that's abhorred, if Big Bill would send the talkers twenty feet of yellow cord! _The Important Man_ You know the man of kingly air? You run across him everywhere. He seems to think his hat a crown; he talks as though he handed down most all the wisdom that the seers have gathered in a thousand years. His dignity is most sublime; to joke about him is a crime, and when you meet him it is wise to lift your hat and close your eyes; and it would please him if you'd just lie down and grovel in the dust. That is the wiser course, I say, but I'm a feeble-minded jay, and when I meet the swelled-up man, I jolly him the best I can; I would to him the fact recall that he's but mortal, after all. He's naught but bones and legs and trunk, and lungs and lights, and kindred junk; he breathes the same old germy air that's breathed by hoboes everywhere. And when he dies, as die he must, he'll make as cheap a grade of dust as any Richard Roe in town; the monument that holds him down may tell his glories for a while, but folks will read it with a smile, and say: "That dead one must have thought that he was Johnnie on the spot, when he was on this earthly shore; I never heard of him before." _Toddling Home_