PUNCH, OR THE LONDON CHARIVARI

VOLUME 105, August 19th 1893

edited by Sir Francis Burnand

POPULAR SONGS RE-SUNG. "BLAZY BILL; OR, THE BICYCLE CAD."

Air—"Daisy Bell; or, a Bicycle made for Two."

"The churl in nature up and down" is perennial and ubiquitous. Like the god Vishnu, he has many avatars. Every new development of popular pastime (for instance) developes its own particular species of "Cad." Leech's "Galloping Snob" of a quarter of a century ago has been succeeded by that Jehu of the "Bike," the Cycling Cad, to whose endearing manners and customs in the Queen's highway, and elsewhere, the long-suffering pedestrian is persuaded a laggard Law will shortly have to find its attention urgently directed. Mr. Punch, who is of the same opinion, adapts Mr. Harry Dacre's popular song to what he is convinced will be a popular purpose.

Perturbed Pedestrian sings:—

There is a fear within my heart,

Blazy! Blazy!

Planted one day with a demon dart.

Planted by Blazy Bill.

Whether he'll kill me, or kill me not,

Smash me or only spill,

Little I know, but I'd give a lot

To be rescued from Blazy Bill.

Chorus—

Blazy! Blazy!

Give me a chance, Sir, do!

I'm half crazy,

All for the fear of you.

You haven't a stylish way, Sir,

I can't admire that "blazer"

(Which you think sweet).

The curse of the street

Is the Bicycle Cad—like you!

You rattle along as though for your life,

Blazy! Blazy!

Pedalling madly, with mischief rife,

Blundering Blazy Bill!

When the road's dark we need Argus sight,

Your bell and your lamp do nil

But dazzle our eyes and our ears affright,

Blustering Blazy Bill!

Chorus—

Blazy! Blazy!

Bother your "biking" crew!

I'm half crazy,

All for sheer dread of you.

I can't afford a carriage,

If I walk—in Brixton or Harwich—

The curse of the street,

I am sure to meet

In a Bicycle Cad like you!

Why should we stand this wheel-bred woe?

Blazy! Blazy!

Yes, your vile bell you will ring, I know,

Suddenly, Blazy Bill,

When you're close on my heels, and a trip I make,

And, unless I skedaddle with skill,

I'm over before you have put on the brake,

Half-fuddled Blazy Bill!

Chorus—

Blazy! Blazy!

Turn up wild wheeling, do!

I'm half crazy,

All in blue funk of you.

The Galloping Snob was a curse, Sir,

But the Walloping Wheelman's a worser.

I'd subscribe my quid

To be thoroughly rid

Of all Bicycle Cads like you!

SHOOTING THE CHUTES.

(After Southey.)

A Vision of Earl's Court.

Here they go hurrying,

Up the steps scurrying,

Pushing and jostling,

Elbowing, hustling,

Squeezing and wheezing they rush to the top.

Puffing and panting,

Tearing and ranting,

(First-rate for Banting,) onward they climb.

Up on the landing,

Scarce room for standing,

Man is commanding, "There you must stop!

Don't cross the railing,

Keep to the paling;

Place for two more, Sirs,

Go on before, Sirs;

List to the roar, Sirs—ain't it sublime!

Tuck in the mackintosh,

Hold tight, Sir!" "Oh, what bosh!"

Side by side seated,

Breathless and heated,

Freezing and sneezing,

Down the Chute shooting,

Yelling and hooting,

'Arry and 'Arriet, Princess and Peer,

White man and black man and Injun to steer.

"You're sure there's no danger?" "There's nothing to fear."

"Are babies admitted?" "O no, mum, not 'ere."

And waving and raving,

And beaming and steaming,

And laughing and chaffing,

And thumping and bumping,

And plumping and jumping,

And spinning and grinning,

And chattering and clattering,

And blushing and gushing and rushing and flushing,

And bawling and sprawling and hauling and calling,

And foaming, bemoaning a bonnet dropped off,

Not hearing the jeering of people who scoff,

The peril of spilling delightfully thrilling,

Tho' incivil devil's instilling cavilling;

And screaming, not dreaming of being upset,

And splashing and dashing and dripping with wet,

And screeching and reaching for hat blown away,

Excited, affrighted, delighted, benighted,

And calling and bawling Hurrah and Hurray!

"And so never ending but always descending

Sounds and motions for ever and ever are blending;"

All at once all is o'er, with a mighty uproar,

And drenched and bedraggled they land on the shore.

"Lethe had passed her Lips."—Mrs. R. had often come across the name of this classic stream in the course of her reading. She pronounced it as one syllable, and said that "as this celebrated river was in Scotland—she knew the name quite well—what she wanted to know was, why weren't these waters bottled by a Company?"

AT THE SEASIDE CHURCH PARADE.

(A Conversation à la Mode.)

He. So very glad to see you. (Aside.) Hope she won't shut me up, she's so sharp!

She. Quite pleased to have met. (Aside.) Can't stand much of him, he's so stupid!

He. I suppose when you were in town you went to the Academy?

She. Yes, and saw all the pictures—and didn't like them.

He. And went to the Opera?

She. Yes, every night—and am tired of talking about it.

He. And of course you went to Henley?

She. Yes, and to the Eton and Harrow Match, and to Ascot, and to Wimbledon to see the Lawn Tennis finals.

He. But perhaps you never went to the House of Commons?

She. Oh, yes, I did—on the Terrace, and also to the Ladies' Gallery. The rows were most amusing—saw them all.

He. And did you go to many parties?

She. To every party of any consequence, and all the really nice dinners.

He. Were you at the Royal Wedding?

She. Oh, don't talk of that. The subject is quite exhausted. (After a pause.) Pray, have you no conversation?

He. Well, I don't know. I suppose you went to church this morning, and heard the Dean preach?

She. Oh, I really must beg your pardon. If you can't find anything better to talk about on a Sunday than the points of a sermon you had far better say nothing at all.

[Scene closes in upon an unbroken silence.

NEW KING COAL.

(A new Mining-Capitalist Version of an old Nursery Rhyme, dedicated and commended to the thoughtful consideration of the colliers on strike in Northumberland and Durham.)

[Putting it in the form of a conundrum, Mr. Punch would ask the Colliers who may read this rhyme the following question, the answer to which may throw a light upon the meaning of New King Coal's jubilant doggerel ditty:—

"When prices rise—even in the midst of the Dog Days—and the output of first-class coal falls, who reaps the advantage of the enhanced value and readier sale of accumulated stocks of small and slaggy 'rubbish'?">[

O our New King Coal

Is an artful old soul,

And an artful old soul is he;

And a jolly good Strike

Is a game he must like—

When it pulls in the £ s. d.

He calls for his "weed" and he calls for his "fizz,"

And he calls for his—Fiddle-de-dee!

Every fiddler has his own little fiddle,

And a very fine fiddle has he.

"£ s. d., £ s. d.," sings King Coal, "Fiddle-de-dee!

Oh! an opportune Strike is the thing for me!"

O, there's none so rare

As can compare

With King Coal and his Fiddle-de-dee!

ROBERT AT GILDALL.

Ah, wot a change has suddenly cum over the hold Copperation! From sitch recepshuns of Kings and Queens, and Princes and Princesses, and Royal Dooks and Dutchesses, and Zarrowitches and setterer, and all in their werry best clothes, too! as I never witnessed before nor since, to cum suddenly upon nuffin but Gog and Magog, is a strikin fac indeed. As the Rite onerabel Lord Mare werry propperly said, "Ah wot a fall is here my Country-men!"

And what a blooming staggerer it was to finish off with the King and Queen of Denmark! of all people in the World! Why I has allers been tort to bleeve, from what I have seen at the Play, that neether on em wornt not werry great things as regards behaviour to the poor Prince Hamblet, but Brown says as that's all over long, long ago, and isn't to be spoke of no more, no, not for ever! and so we must drop it. I think, upon the hole, as I likes the Prince of Wales the best of all on em, he does allers seem to enjy hisself so much.

We had him in the City wunce at Church, and twice at Gildall to dinner, all in about a munth, and that ain't so bad for a near aparrent. And he does seem allers so much atome. Why I acshally overherd him say to our Blushing Town Clark, after dining the King of Denmark, "How well you have dun it all, but you allers do it well at Gildall!"

I wunder how many hundred sentries it will be before he says ditto to the Cheerman of the Country Counsel, poor feller! after sitch a dinner to sitch a company? Praps about another 700! Robert.

AN UNEARNED INCREMENT.

Our Irish Curate (persuasively). "Now, Doctor dear, here 's the very thing. Ye've been giving a Tenth of your Income, like a Man. Well, now, times are bad. Double it, and give a Twentieth!"

Off and On.—She had been longing for a new dress. At last the extra money was saved, and she bought it. "It's off my mind now," she exclaimed, "and, which pleases me more, it's on my body."

ENGLISH AS SHE IS WROTE. —The advertisement of an hotel in Germany concludes, after praising everything highly, with this sentence—"Accomplished drinks, captivating meats."

FRENCH TRANSLATION OF AN OLD PLAY CALLED "LOVE'S LAST SHIFT."—"La dernière Chemise de l'Amour."

THE TOUR THAT NEVER WAS.

(By an Undecided Man.)

Between now and my holidays there but remain two solid days,

And thinking where I'll spend my "vac" has driven me wild with worry;

In vain have I surveyed acres of plans and maps and Bædekers,

And purchased a small library of "Handy Guides" of Murray.

Shall I, for want of better, say I'll view the Vierwaldstättersee,

Or watch the Staubbach fall in mist like web of an arachnid?

Or else, the dawn to see, get up o'ernight upon the Righi-top—

But no, I feel that Jödel-land is now a trifle hackneyed!

For a flutter at chemin-de-fer I might (the place is handy) fare

To Trouville, and along the plage a "Milor" on the spree be;

I could in Teuton musikshaus (till I of Wagner grew sick) souse

In "Hofbräu," and essay to flirt with each biergarten Hebe.

But then, if I to Norway turn, as Ibsenite I'd more weight earn—

And salmon-fishing mid the Kvæns is certainly high-class sport;

Or rumble in a tarantass o'er Russia? No, an arrant ass

I were, to go where night and day you're badgered for your passport!

I'd like (my programme's large), a panoramic glimpse of far Japan

From Fuji, and round Biwa Lake I'd in a jinrickshaw go;

Or even—for a hasty bet—I'd (like Miss Taylor) pace Thibet,

Or "blue" my surplus cash at what the Yankees call "Shecawgo."

Look here! I'll have to sham a tour (though but a humble amatoor

At yarning), as this sort of thing is giving me the fidgets!

I'll—since I've eased my intellect by tripping thus in print—elect

To stay at home and twiddle (for the sake of rhyme) my digits!

The Place for Lawn Tennis.—"Way down in Tennessee."

THE TWO POTS.

(A Morality for Mammon.)

When Mammon in commerce has "made a big pot,"

He is free to "retire upon what he has got,"

And what need he care for the children of toil

Who have helped in their hundreds that "big pot" to boil?

Pot! Pot! Gushers talk rot;

But Demas "retires upon what he has got."

How did he get it, that pot full of gold?

That is a story that's yet to be told.

Children of Gibeon helped, 'tis well known,

At filling his pot—barely boiling their own!

Pot! Pot! How to keep hot—

That is the problem—the poor man's pot!

Poor pot-au-feu! 'Tis to keep you a-boil

Hewers and Drawers so ceaselessly toil;

But when they've filled Wealth's big pot full of gold,

What does he care if their pot becomes cold.

Pot! Pot! Let the poor go—to pot.

Mammon—"retires upon what he has got!"

Mrs. R.—She is very tender-hearted. "Of course," she says, "it's very nice of what they call 'The Forsters' parents—though why 'Forster' I don't know. But certainly, even when they're brought up as one of the family of the Forsters, yet it does make me feel very sad when I see an adapted child."

Moral and Social Queries.—When a man has lost his own character, is he justified in taking away anybody else's? At a party if somebody has taken away your hat, aren't you justified in taking somebody else's?

THE ADVENTURES OF PICKLOCK HOLES.

(By Cunnin Toil.)

No. II.—THE DUKE'S FEATHER.

Two months had passed without my hearing a word of Holes. I knew he had been summoned to Irkoutsk by the Czar of Russia in order to help in investigating the extraordinary theft of one of the Government silver mines, which had completely and mysteriously disappeared in one night. All the best intellects of the terrible secret police, the third section of the Government of the Russian Empire, had exhausted themselves in the vain endeavour to probe this mystery to the bottom. Their failure had produced a dangerous commotion in the Empire of the Czar; there were rumours of a vast Nihilist plot, which was to shake the Autocracy to its foundations, and, as a last resource, the Czar, who had been introduced to Holes by Olga Fiaskoffskaia, the well-known Russian Secret Agent at the Court of Lisbon, had appealed to the famous detective to lend his aid in discovering the authors of a crime which was beginning to turn the great white Czar into ridicule in all the bazaars of Central Asia. Holes, whose great mind had been lying fallow for some little time, had immediately consented; and the last I had seen of him was two months before the period at which this story opens, when I had said good-bye to him at Charing-Cross Station.

As for myself, I was spending a week in a farmhouse situated close to the village of Blobley-in-the-Marsh. Three miles from the gates of the farmhouse lay Fourcastle Towers, the ancestral mansion of Rear-Admiral the Duke of Dumpshire, the largest and strangest landowner of the surrounding district. I had a nodding acquaintance with His Grace, whom I had once attended for scarlatina when he was a midshipman. Since that time, however, I had seen very little of him, and, to tell the truth, I had made no great effort to improve the acquaintance. The Duke, one of the haughtiest members of our blue-blooded aristocracy, had been called by his naval duties to all parts of the habitable globe; I had steadily pursued my medical studies, and, except for the biennial visit which etiquette demanded, I had seen little or nothing of the Duke. My stay at the farmhouse was for purposes of rest. I had been overworked, that old tulwar wound, the only memento of the Afghan Campaign, had been troubling me, and I was glad to be able to throw off my cares and my black coat, and to revel for a week in the rustic and unconventional simplicity of Wurzelby Farm.

One evening, two days after my arrival, I was sitting in the kitchen close to the fire, which, like myself, was smoking. For greater comfort I had put on my old mess-jacket. The winter wind was whistling outside, but besides that only the ticking of the kitchen clock disturbed my meditations. I was just thinking how I should begin my article on Modern Medicine for the Fortnightly Review, when a slight cough at my elbow caused me to turn round. Beside me stood Picklock Holes, wrapped in a heavy, close-fitting fur moujik. He was the first to speak.

"Beside me stood Picklock Holes, wrapped in a heavy, close-fitting fur moujik."

"You seem surprised to see me," he said. "Well, perhaps that is natural; but really, my dear fellow, you might employ your time to better purpose than in trying to guess the number of words in the first leading article in the Times of the day before yesterday."

I was about to protest when he stopped me.

"I know perfectly well what you are going to say, but it is useless to urge that the country is dull, and that a man must employ his brain somehow. That kind of employment is the merest wool-gathering."

He plucked a small piece of Berlin worsted—I had been darning my socks—off my left trouser, and examined it curiously. My admiration for the man knew no bounds.

"Is that how you know?" I asked. "Do you mean to tell me that merely by seeing that small piece of fancy wool on my trousers you guessed I had been trying to calculate the number of words in the Times leader? Holes, Holes, will you never cease from astounding me?"

He did not answer me, but bared his muscular arm and injected into it a strong dose of morphia with a richly-chased little gold instrument tipped with a ruby.

"A gift from the Czar," said Holes, in answer to my unspoken thoughts. "When I discovered the missing silver-mine on board the yacht of the Grand Duke Ivanoff, his Imperial Majesty first offered me the Chancellorship of his dominions, but I begged him to excuse me, and asked for this pretty toy. Bah, the Russian police are bunglers."

As he made this remark the door opened and Sergeant Bluff of the Dumpshire Constabulary entered hurriedly.

"I beg your pardon, Sir," he said, addressing me, with evident perturbation; "but would you step outside with me for a moment. There's been some strange work down at——"

Holes interrupted him.

"Don't say any more," he broke in. "You've come to tell us about the dreadful poaching affray in Hagley Wood. I know all about it, and tired as I am I'll help you to find the criminals."

It was amusing to watch the Sergeant's face. He was ordinarily an unemotional man, but as Holes spoke to him he grew purple with astonishment.

"Beggin' your pardon, Sir," he said; "I didn't know about no——"

"My name is Holes," said my friend calmly.

"What, Mr. Picklock Holes, the famous detective?"

"The same, at your service; but we are wasting time. Let us be off."

The night was cold, and a few drops of rain were falling. As we walked along the lane Holes drew from the Sergeant all the information he wanted as to the number of pheasants on the Duke's estate, the extent of his cellars, his rent-roll, and the name of his London tailor. Bluff dropped behind after this cross-examination with a puzzled expression, and whispered to me:

"A wonderful man that Mister Holes. Now how did he know about this 'ere poaching business? I knew nothing about it. Why I come to you, Sir, to talk about that retriever dog you lost."

"Hush," I said; "say nothing. It would only annoy Holes, and interfere with his inductions. He knows his own business best." Sergeant Bluff gave a grumbling assent, and in another moment we entered the great gate of Fourcastle Towers, and were ushered into the hall, where the Duke was waiting to receive us.

"To what am I indebted for the honour of this visit?" said his Grace, with all the courtly politeness of one in whose veins ran the blood of the Crusaders. Then, changing his tone, he spoke in fierce sailor-language: "Shiver my timbers! what makes you three stand there like that? Why, blank my eyes, you ought to——" What he was going to say will never be known, for Holes dashed forward.

"Silence, Duke," he said, sternly. "We come to tell you that there has been a desperate poaching affray. The leader of the gang lies insensible in Hagley Wood. Do you wish to know who he was?" So saying, he held up to the now terrified eyes of the Duke the tail-feather of a golden pheasant. "I found it in his waistcoat pocket," he said, simply.

"My son, my son!" shrieked the unfortunate Duke. "Oh Alured, Alured, that it should have come to this!" and he fell to the floor in convulsions.

"You will find Earl Mountravers at the cross-roads in Hagley Wood," said Holes to the Sergeant. "He is insensible."

The Earl was convicted at the following Assizes, and sentenced to a long term of penal servitude. His ducal father has never recovered from the disgrace. Holes, as usual, made light of the matter and of his own share in it.

"I met the Earl," he told me afterwards, "as I was walking to your farmhouse. When he ventured to doubt one of my stories, I felled him to the earth. The rest was easy enough. Poachers? Oh dear no, there were none. But it is precisely in these cases that ingenuity comes in."

"Holes," I said, "I admire you more and more every day."

Joke for Joke.—A ruffian at Walsall, "for a joke," dropped a little boy over the bridge into the river. The inhabitants of that town took the cowardly brute to the same bridge, and dropped him over in the same place. Bravo men (and women) of Walsall! If the lex talionis, in the same spirit of impartial jocularity, could be applied as efficaciously to all "practical jokers," civilised Society might soon be rid of one of its most intolerable pests.

"So much depends on how you take things," as the thief remarked after a dexterous performance while the policeman's back was turned.

Brief Description of a Comic Ballet d'Action.—"Too funny for words."

THE SCHOPENHAUER BALLADS.

No. II.—THE MOSQUITO.

I am a restless Mosquito,

Well hated by the world, I know,

For faults that are not mine;

I bite to live (some live to bite),

I sting from sheer necessity, not spite,—

I would my lot were thine.

I'd take thy bites, you'd love my sting,

And bear the petty pains they bring

Just like a Hindoo Saint;

I would not blame you, 'bottle fly,

You have to live the same as I—

A beauty without paint.

We cannot all be butterflies,

Or larks that carol in the skies,—

Take life for what it's worth;

We've all our wretched aches and pains,

Our losses now—and now our gains—

A little while on earth.

And when we get our final call—

Mosquito, pole-cat, skunk, and all

The vermin meek or bold—

We shall not for the verdict quake,