Chapter III

There’s another sort of bills--
Brazen bills!
Each its diabolic task effectively fulfils,
How all hunger to be paid
In that paper cannonade!
Will the trouble never end?
Still they send and send and send,
Day and night,
In a clamorous appealing to the debtor’s scanty purse,
In a wild and greedy grabbing for the starved and shrunken purse;
And you curse, curse, curse,
Sinking sure from bad to worse,
Till a resolute endeavour
Cries, “Now--now flit, or never,
And renounce the unequal fight!”
Oh, the bills, bills, bills--
They are bitter, bitter pills
To digest.
Smiling ghosts of pleasures flown,
Lo! we greet ye with a groan;
Ye will never more return, sweet hours of rest.
We shall have no more repose
From the stunning
And the dunning;
For the monster grows and grows,
Till it shatters iron wills,
Under crushing
And unblushing
Importunity. It fills
With a frantic, maniac anger in the clutches of the bills,
Of the bills,
Of the bills, bills, bills,
Of the screeching and beseeching cloud of bills.