Page 18 - Poetry-Romance

“All the world expects the wedding, and next Tuesday is the day;
I was going to look so stunning, and—oh! what will people say?
Then there’s Brown—think what a triumph it will surely be to him!”
“I must say it is a fix!” replies the Colonel, looking grim.

Then the ladies crowded round her: “We are coming to the pier!
Are you better? Bite this cracker; it will do you good, my dear.
Pretty soon we’ll have our chowder—you are fond of that, you know.”
But the maid behind her muffler only moaned and murmured, “No!
“Leave me here!” And so they left her, with the Colonel by her side;
Never sat so glum a bridegroom by so dismal-faced a bride.
All the rest went, laughing, romping, on the shore, just out of reach
Of the breakers that came dashing their white foreheads on the beach.
All but Brown: up to the cottage through the glaring sand he trod,
Proudly following the varlet who bore off the monster cod.
“For,” says he, “I hooked the fellow, and I’m bound to see him weighed.”
That is done, and still he lingers, “just to see a chowder made.”
Through the fellow’s long white waistcoat slides the steward’s
polished knife;
Stops at something: “Here’s a—Bless me! what in time? Upon my life!”
Now I know you won’t believe me; but there, grinning from within,
Through a very broad incision, with a cool sarcastic grin,
Stowed away with stolen clam bait, crab and shrimp and octopod,
In the belly of that careless, undiscriminating cod,
Was the strangest, oddest, queerest, most amazing prize, which he
For some shining bait had swallowed as it wriggled through the sea.
“Arabella’s teeth, by Heaven!”—Brown had seized them, and, behold!
In their “Milky Way of whiteness” there’s his little “star of gold,”
Where the dentist, more completely to disguise the vulgar truth,
By a masterly device had plugged an artificial tooth!
Out rushed Brown—with tragic gestures he ran down upon the shore,
His fine eyes in frenzy rolling as they never rolled before;
In his hand he grasped the treasure. “Oh, I see it all!” says he;
“Without these she can’t be married, and she’ll maybe yet have me.”
Then up went his hand to hurl them, but as quickly it came down:
After all, there was a streak of magnanimity in Brown.
“Oh, deceitful Arabella! falsest of all womankind!
I was going to fling ‘em further, but I guess I’ll change my mind.
“Though she’s treated me so meanly, and I know she loves me not,
I won’t be too hard upon her”—and he started for the yacht.

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