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POEMS OF THE CRADLE.

CANTO XIII.

When I was a bachelor I lived by myself;
All the bread and cheese I had, I laid upon the shelf.
But the rats and the mice they made such a strife,
I was forced to go to London to buy myself a wife.
The roads were so bad, and the lanes were so narrow,
I had to bring my wife home in a wheelbarrow.
The wheelbarrow broke. My wife had a fall;
Deuce take the wheelbarrow, my wife, and all.

The above lines were written when the author was quite advanced in
years; when he had solved, in his humble way, the great problem of life,
and discovered the futility of mundane things generally, and t
undesirableness of an unsuccessful or unfortunate existence; when he
could look back through a long vista of years, and see the follies of
his youth and the mistakes of his manhood. It should have been placed at
the end of his book, with only the word Finis after it; but somehow,
either by mistake of the author or of the publisher, it was placed among
the records of the simple events of the village, and thus loses half its
force. However, let the history, placed as it is, be a warning to rash
young men who contemplate matrimony; and let them give heed to it, lest
they also have cause to repent of their doings and exclaim with the
poet:--