A HOLE in the pocket's a very bad thing,
And brings a boy trouble faster
Than anything under the sun, I think.
My mother, she calls it disaster.
For all in one day,
I lost, I may say,
Through a hole not as big as a dollar,
A number of things,
Including some rings
From a chain Fido wore as a collar,
My knife, a steel pen, a nice little note
That my dear cousin Annie had sent me.
The boy who found that, pinned it on to his hat,
And tries all the time to torment me.
I'd lost a new dime
That very same time,
But it lodged in the heel of my stocking;
And one thing beside,
Which to you I confide,
Though I fear you may think it quite shocking:
The doctor had made some nice little pills
For me to take home to the baby;
But, when I reached there, I was quite in despair,
They had slipped through my pocket, it may be.
Aunt Sallie, she,
As cool as can be,
Said, a hole in a boy's reputation,
Is harder to cure,
And worse to endure,
Than all pockets unsound in the nation.
Still a hole in the pocket's a very bad thing,
And I am sure a real cause of disaster.
But baby is well; so you must never tell;
Perhaps he got well all the faster.
--GWINNET HOWARD, _in Independent_.
[Illustration: ROUND THE FAMILY LAMP]
AND now we must begin to confess, very reluctantly it is true, that
the long evenings we have had the past few months around the Family
Lamp are slowly growing shorter and shorter. Before we can have time
to realize it very deeply somebody will say, "Oh! don't light the lamp
just yet, it is so much pleasanter to sit in the twilight," and then it
won't seem but about ten minutes, and the children and young folks will
be whisked off to bed, and the games will be crowded entirely off the
programme, and the Family will feel as if it had no good-night frolic
at all. So we must get all the fun we can, and to-night we propose as a
grand bit of sport--