If you didn't look out for yourself they'd fly
Like bullets into your open eye
And knock it out of the back of your head.

"There isn't a turkey or goose or swan,
Or a duck that quacks, or a hen that clucks,
Can make a difference on a run
When a grasshopper plague has once begun;
`If you'd finance us,' I says, `I'd buy
Ten thousand emus and have a try;
The job,' I says, `is too big for ducks!

"`You must fetch a duck when you come to stay;
A great big duck -- a Muscovy toff --
Ready and fit,' I says, `for the fray;
And if the grasshoppers come our way
You turn your duck into the lucerne patch,
And I'd be ready to make a match
That the grasshoppers eats his feathers off!'

"He came to visit us by and by,
And it just so happened one day in Spring
A kind of a cloud came over the sky --
A wall of grasshoppers nine miles high,
And nine miles thick, and nine hundred wide,
Flyin' in regiments, side by side,
And eatin' up every living thing.

"All day long, like a shower of rain,
You'd hear 'em smackin' against the wall,