If you meet a little fräulein
As pretty as a rosebud,
And eyes that make your silly heart-strings
Thump and bump and glow--
Don’t stand and linger dawdlin’
When you _know_ you’re getting maudlin,
But call yourself a bally fool
And pack your trunk and go.
If the mocking, hollow laughter,
Like the creaking of a rafter,
Greets you--standing watching after
At the Chance you didn’t know:
Sneering in its craven power
Comes to seek you by the hour,
Try the palm-grove, veldt or paddy--
Pack your trunk and go.
If the skies are rent asunder
O’er some hasty little blunder,
And you start to really wonder
How _wise_ some people grow:
Let the empty carp-heads haggle--
Let the teacup headwear waggle--
Just tell ’em all to run along--
And pack your trunk and go.
If the silent blades are dipping
And the green canoes are slipping
By the birches white and dripping
In the crimson after-glow:
And the harvest-moon is rising
With a fullness most surprising--
It’s summer on the northern lakes
So pack your trunk and go.
If the Faith your Fathers taught you
And the Land your Fathers wrought you,
(The Land their blood has bought you),
Shall hear the bugles blow--
Don’t watch in doubt and waiting,
Don’t stand procrastinating,
But say good-bye with laughing eye
And pack your trunk and go.
_Where the coral turns to cactus,
And the cactus turns to harvest,
And the harvest turns to hemlock,
And the hemlock turns to snow:
By the phosphor-bordered beaches--
By the endless, bendless reaches--
You will find him where the Whisper bade him
Pack his trunk and go._