Chapter IV

Says Aleck to Alice,
“I live in a palace.”
Says Alice to Tim,
“I don’t believe him.”
Says Tim to his cousin,
“I love you three dozen;”
The cousin, she wondered,
And asked for a hundred,
Instead of three dozen:
Says Tim, “You are fussing;
Three dozen I love you,
If that will not move you,
My love I will carry
To Magsie or Mary.”

A BIG NOISE

Twenty whales
Lashing their tails;
Twenty guns
Fired at once;
Twenty cats
Howling in flats;
Twenty parrots
Calling carrots;
Twenty apiece,
Besides, of these,--
Lions roaring,
Giants snoring,
Waggons rolling,
Bells tolling;
These together,
In stormy weather,
With a steam hammer,
Would make a clamour.

THE ALARM

A giant at the door behind,
For Baby? Nothing of the kind!
But even if a Giant were to come,
With an eye like an Orleans plum,
And hands like wolf’s paws,
And teeth like horrible saws,
And a voice like a dreadful cough,
And he carried baby off,
And fed her up in a dungeon
(To fatten her for his luncheon),
A dungeon as high as the stars;
And, if the dungeon had bars,
And was guarded by a horrid vulture,
And an eagle of savage culture;
And if from the wall of the castle
A dragon hung like a tassel,
And the castle was built among mountains,
In a lonely situation
At the very end of creation,
With flames spouting round it like fountains--
Why, mother could find her way
To the castle any day,
And make the old dragon wriggle,
And fight the vulture and the eagle,
And blow up the castle--pop!
And bring baby home to her sop,
And the sop should have sugar extra,
Because the Giant had vexed her.

CICERO BRICK

I

There was a boy at Hampton Wick,
Whose name, as it happened, was Cicero Brick;
He fell in love in desperate fashion
With a girl who fully returned his passion.

But she had a father who said, “No, no!
What! marry a boy named Cicero?
Never, with my consent, my dear!”--
What happened next we soon shall hear.

The daughter wept till the father said,
“Cicero Brick and you may wed
When he has spoken an oration
To an enormous congregation!”

II

The public felt no great surprise
When Cicero Brick did advertise
A course of lectures--five or six,--
O, what a notion of Cicero Brick’s!

St. James’s Hall, in Regent Street,
For these orations he said was meet;
The first oration that he spoke
Two dozen heard it--what a joke!

The next time ten, the next time four,
And then the public came no more;
But Cicero Brick--_this_ who shall blame?--
Spoke the oration all the same.

“Read my advertisement,” quoth he,
“And tell me what you in it see
About the oration’s being _heard_!
It says, ‘_delivered_.’ I keep my word!”