THE other day I bought a hen, which fowl the butcher tossed me, and I was pained and startled when I found out what it cost me. Just eighty cents it set me back, that chicken thin and scrawny; with wails I filled the butcher's shack, and tore my whiskers tawny. "When I was young," I sternly cried, "and lived three miles from Wooster, one-third that sum, doggone your hide, would buy a hen or rooster. Then for a dollar one could buy all kinds of goods and chattels, a fowl, a parasol, a pie, and divers baby rattles." "When you were young," the butcher said, "a man would work like thunder, and when at night he crawled to bed, he'd earned but little plunder. I have no doubt your father deemed a dollar big as blazes; too wonderful and great it seemed for any human phrases. You take in ten where he drew one, and yet, when buying chickens, because your plunk won't buy a ton, you grumble like the dickens." And then, because his heart was sore, he wept a briny river, and with my person mopped his floor, and smote me with a liver. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...LINES WRITTEN IN THE ALBUM AT ELBINGERODE, IN HARTZ FOREST by SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE TWO OF A TRADE by SAMUEL WILLOUGHBY DUFFIELD SONGS ON THE VOICES OF BIRDS; SEA-MEWS IN WINTER TIME by JEAN INGELOW PEGGY, FR. THE GENTLE SHEPHERD by ALLAN RAMSAY TIPPERARY: 5. BY OUR OWN EUGENE FIELD by FRANKLIN PIERCE ADAMS EVENING TRAINS by MARY TRUE AYER |