What _was_ it about? No dreamer
Am I! No--I think--I frown--
When next I make a screamer
In bed--_I will write it down_.
By the side of the bed a taper
Shall ever with matches be,
A pencil and piece of paper,
To note what occurs to me.
* * * * *
Since then I have tried, but the late joke,
As seen in my bedside scrawl,
Is always so poor,--that the great joke,
_I'm sure, was no joke at all!_
* * * * *
YES OR NO?
["The hand-writing of well-educated Ladies is often
disgracefully illegible."--_A Ladies' Journal_.]
Oh, never did lover in fable
In such a predicament stand,
A letter I wrote to my MABEL,
To ask for her heart and her hand,
With compliments worded so nicely,
A lifelong devotion I swore;
She's answered--and left me precisely
As wise as before!
It is true that I begged, when inditing
My note, a reply with all speed,
And MABEL, to judge from the writing,
Fulfilled my petition indeed!
The drift of this scrawl, so erratic,
I am wholly unable to guess--
It may be refusal emphatic,
Or can it be "Yes"?
"Affection" she'll feel for me "ever,"
But stay--if that blot is an "_n_"
It turns it at once into "never,"
Or is it a slip of the pen?
Her heart will a "truant (or true?) be,"
And what is the word just above?
It looks like--it cannot be--"booby"!
Perhaps it is "love.
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