Fables for the Frivolous

Excerpt

  A farmer built around his crop
    A wall, and crowned his labors
  By placing glass upon the top
    To lacerate his neighbors,
      Provided they at any time
      Should feel disposed the wall to climb.

  He also drove some iron pegs
    Securely in the coping,
  To tear the bare, defenceless legs
    Of brats who, upward groping,
      Might steal, despite the risk of fall,
      The grapes that grew upon the wall.

  One day a fox, on thieving bent,
    A crafty and an old one,
  Most shrewdly tracked the pungent scent
    That eloquently told one
      That grapes were ripe and grapes were good
      And likewise in the neighborhood.

  He threw some stones of divers shapes
    The luscious fruit to jar off:
  It made him ill to see the grapes
    So near and yet so far off.
      His throws were strong, his aim was fine,
      But "Never touched me!" said the vine.

  The farmer shouted, "Drat the boys!"
  And, mounting on a ladder,
  He sought the cause of all the noise;
  No farmer could be madder,
    Which was not hard to understand
    Because the glass had cut his hand.

  His passion he could not restrain,
    But shouted out, "You're thievish!"
  The fox replied, with fine disdain,
    "Come, country, don't be peevish."
      (Now "country" is an epithet
      One can't forgive, nor yet forget.)

  The farmer rudely answered back
    With compliments unvarnished,
  And downward hurled the bric-a-brac
    With which the wall was garnished,
      In view of which demeanor strange,
      The fox retreated out of range.

  "I will not try the grapes to-day,"
    He said. "My appetite is
  Fastidious, and, anyway,
    I fear appendicitis."
      (The fox was one of the elite
      Who call it site instead of seet.)

  The moral is that if your host
    Throws glass around his entry
  You know it isn't done by most
    Who claim to be the gentry,
      While if he hits you in the head
      You may be sure he's underbred.

THE PERSEVERING TORTOISE

AND

THE PRETENTIOUS HARE

  Once a turtle, finding plenty
    In seclusion to bewitch,
  Lived a dolce far niente
    Kind of life within a ditch;
  Rivers had no charm for him,
    As he told his wife and daughter,
  "Though my friends are in the swim,
    Mud is thicker far than water."

  One fine day, as was his habit,
    He was dozing in the sun,
  When a young and flippant rabbit
    Happened by the ditch to run:
  "Come and race me," he exclaimed,
    "Fat inhabitant of puddles.
  Sluggard! You should be ashamed.
    Such a life the brain befuddles."

  This, of course, was banter merely,
    But it stirred the torpid blood
  Of the turtle, and severely
    Forth he issued from the mud.
  "Done!" he cried. The race began,
    But the hare resumed his banter,
  Seeing how his rival ran
    In a most unlovely canter.

  Shouting, "Terrapin, you're bested!
    You'd be wiser, dear old chap,
  If you sat you down and rested
    When you reach the second lap."
  Quoth the turtle, "I refuse....