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Departmental ditties, Barrack-room ballads, and other verses
Departmental ditties Barrack-room ballads and other verses Author:Rudyard Kipling Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Attempting two men's duty In that very healthy post; And Mrs. Barrett mourned for him Five lively months at most. Jack Barrett's bones at Quetta Enj... more »oy profound repose; But I shouldn't be astonished If now his spirit knows The reason of his transfer From the Himalayan snows. And, when the Last Great Bugle Call Adown the Hurnai throbs, When the last grim joke is entered In the big black Book of Jobs, And Quetta graveyards give again Their victims to the air, I shouldn't like to be the man Who sent Jack Barrett there. THE POST THAT FITTED. Though tangled and twisted the course of true love, Tlris ditty explains No tangle's so tangled it cannot improve If the Lover has brains. E the steamer bore him Eastward, Sleary was engaged to marry An attractive girl at Tunbridge, whom he called "my little Carrie." Sleary's pay was very modest ; Sleary was the other way. Who can cook a two -plate dinner on eight paltry dibs a day ? Long he pondered o'er the question in his scantly furnished quarters — Then proposed to Minnie Boffkin, eldest of Judge Boffkin's daughters. Certainly an impecunious Subaltern was not a catch, But the Boffkins knew that Minnie mightn't make another match. So they recognized the business, and, to feed and clothe the bride, Got him made a Something Something somewhere on the Bombay side. Anyhow, the billet carried pay enough for him to marry — As the artless Sleary put it: —" Just the thing for me and Carrie." Did he, therefore, jilt Miss Boffkin — impulse of a baser mind ? No! He started epileptic fits of an appalling kind. (Of his modus operandi only this much I could gather:— "Pears' shaving sticks will give you little taste and lots of lather.") Frequently in ...« less