But, O, lack-a-day!
How time slips away!

Who'd have thought that while Cupid was playing these tricks

Ten years had elapsed, and I'd turned twentysix ?

"I care not a whit,

He's not grown a bit,"

Says my Aunt; "it will still be a very good fit.”
So Janet and She,

Now about thirty-three,

(The maid had been jilted by Mr. Magee,)
Each taking one end of "the Shirt" on her knee,
Again began working with hearty good-will,
"Felling the Seams," and "whipping the Frill,"-
For, twenty years since, though the Ruffle had
vanished,

A Frill like a fan had by no means been banished;
People wore them at playhouses, parties, and
churches,

Like overgrown fins of overgrown perches.

Now, then, by these two thus laying their caps
Together, my "Shirt" had been finished, perhaps,
But for one of those queer little three-cornered
straps,

Which the ladies call "Side-bits," that sever
the "Flaps";

Here unlucky Janet

Took her needle, and ran it
Right into her thumb, and cried loudly, "Ads

cuss it!

I've spoiled myself now by that 'ere nasty Gusset !”
For a month to come
Poor dear Janet's thumb

And the ostrich plume worked on the corps' Was in that sort of state vulgar people call "Rum."

To her grief and dismay
She discovered one day

Cornet Jones of the Tenth was a little too gay;

For, besides that she saw him- he could not
say nay-

Wink at one of the actresses capering away
In a Spanish bolero, one night at the play,
She found he'd already a wife at Cambray ;
One at Paris, a nymph of the corps de ballet;
And a third down in Kent, at a place called Foot's
Cray.

He was

"viler than dirt!" Fanny vowed to exert

Ten years, or nigh,

Had again gone by,

When Fan, accidentally casting her eye
On a dirty old work-basket, hung up on bigh
In the store-closet where herbs were put by to dry,
Took it down to explore it, she didn't know why.
Within, a pea-soup-colored fragment she spied,

All her powers to forget him, and finish my Of the hue of a November fog in Cheapside,

Shirt.

Or a bad piece of gingerbread spoilt in the baking.

If here is n't Tom's Shirt, that's been so long Again I said, "What make you here, you little

By day or night, then blow me tight!" (he was a vulgar Boy ;)

"Tom to-morrow shall | “And now I'm here, from this here pier it is

I saw a little vulgar Boy, I said, "What make My landlady is Mrs. Jones, we must not keep you here?