Ye little Snails,
With slippery tails,
Who noiselessly travel
Along this gravel,
By a silvery path of slime unsightly,
I learn that you visit my pea-rows nightly.
Felonious your visit, I guess!
And I give you this warning,
That, every morning,
I’ll strictly examine the pods;
And if one I hit on,
With slaver or spit on,
Your next meal will be with the gods.
I own you’re a very ancient race,
And Greece and Babylon were amid;
You have tenanted many a royal dome,
And dwelt in the oldest pyramid;
The source of the Nile!--Oh! you have been there!
In the ark was your floodless bed;
On the moonless night of Marathon
You crawl’d o’er the mighty dead;
But still, though I reverence your ancestries,
I don’t see why you should nibble my peas.
The meadows are yours--the hedge-row and brook,
You may bathe in their dews at morn;
By the aged sea you may sound your _shells_,
On the mountain erect your _horn_;
The fruits and the flowers are your rightful dowers,
Then why--in the name of wonder--
Should my six pea-rows be the only cause
To excite your midnight plunder?
I have never disturbed your slender shells,
You have hung round my aged walk;
And each might have sat, till he died in his fat,
Beneath his own cabbage-stalk;
But now you must fly from the soil of your sires,
Then put on your liveliest crawl;
And think of your poor little snails at home,
Now orphans or emigrants all.
Utensils domestic, and civil, and social,
I give you an evening to pack up:
But if the moon of this night does not rise on your flight,
To-morrow I’ll hang each man Jack up.
You’ll think of my peas and your thievish tricks,
With tears of slime when crossing the _Styx_.