Punch (55.1868)

October 17, isos.] PUNCH, OP THE LONDON CHARIVARI.

159

HE WON’T BE A MASON.

“ The Prince of Wales lias again declined to become a Free
Mason.”-—Daily Papers.

Air—“ The Tree and the Accepted Mason.”

[N.B. It is manifestly not the fault of Mr. Punch that
the donkey of other days, who wrote the doggerel which
still excites the Lodges to frantic delight, laid his accent
on the wrong syllable in accepted.]

We need not prepare,

Tor we can’t get the Heir
To make us a Joyful Occasion,

He thinks it’s all stuff
When we play blind man’s buff
With a free and an Accepted Mason.

Great kings, dukes and lords
Have laid by their swords,

Our mystery to put a good face on,

And no doubt an old prig
In a full-bottomed wig.

Made a marvellous Accepted Mason.

The young Prince op Wales
Doesn’t care for our tales,

Of Jachin, and Boaz, and Jason,

("Like Magogand Gog)

The excuses for prog
With the free and the Accepted Mason.

He consulted the Queen,

'Who responded, serene,

“I think I would answer them Nay, Son,”

And he thought of one Name
Which we never could claim
As that of an Accepted Mason.

A Knight of the Garter
Can hardly sigh arter
The trappings we lovingly gaze on
When decked out, like muff's.

In the collar and cuffs
Of the free and the Accepted Mason.

Nephew. “ Snip, it isn’t Gout, Uncle ?”

Uncle. “ Gout ! Shtuff an’ Nonshensh ! Not a bit of it ! No, Fact
is—Phew—(winces) these con-founded Bootmakers—they make your Boots
so Tight !! ”

A PLAY-DREAM.

Can you interpret dreams, Mr. Punch? Of course you can. Just as you could
finish the Holborn Viaduct, or settle the Irish Question, or the Spanish Question,
or W hat-bonnets-are-to-be-worn-next-winter Question, or any other Question wdiicli
requires an immediate answer, comfortably for everybody. Expound to me then
the meaning of my last night’s vision.

I was in the midst of a great battle, with the Revising Barristers and Richard-
son’s Clarissa, who was eating a Spanish onion, which Father Prim had given her
at one of Dickens’s Readings on Bosworth Field, when a crooked-back gamekeeper
handed me a dead letter, with Mr. Disraeli’s address, and Pope’s works, Avliick
I offered to Miss M. Oliver, at that moment feeding her poultry in the Cromwell
Road—I can hear her inviting “Chuck! Chuck! Chuck!” even iioav—in a pretty
Tyrrel-ese costume, all over Dicky birds, a present from the Lord Mayor who
carried us all to the Star and Garter at Richmond, Avkere, amongst other good
tilings, the Pate, the Charlotte pudding, and the cheese, both York and Double
Gloster, ivere particularly liked. Just as we had commenced, avIio should enter
but Lord Stanley, in his Clarence from Spain. He told us id was all over there
Avith Old Royalty—the Queen (and Miss Collinson) not having “ One Little
Soldier” left—and proposed that we should go to the New Royalty, to see Mr.
Dany’ebs as the (Grand) Duchess, when the butler announced the Dean oe
Cork, avIio was so taken aback that he could only exclaim, Soho! and—that
instant I awoke.

IIoav stupid I am! I never thought of it before. Pardon me for troubling
you. That word “ Soho ” explains all. I had been to Miss Oliver’s amusing
theatre, the Neiv Royalty.—I implore her to keep out all forgers, detectives,
villains of the deepest dye, dark arches, and railway engines at full speed—to see
and be greatly entertained Avit.h Richard the Third, by W. Shakspeare, C. Cibber,
and F. C. Burnand, and after a moderate supper, and before going to bed, had
read the evening papers, and so infused into ttie brain the bewildering mixture
of persons and places now recorded by one who is not \ Syb arite

He does not imply
That our secret’s my eye,

Or the brotherhood’s motive a base ’un;
And we cannot deny
That the time has gone by
For the free and the Accepted Mason.

Shelve the spike-seated stool,

Let the gridiron cool.

And shut up the board that we trace on,
Let the thunder be dumb,

For the Prince will not come
As a free and Accepted Mason.

But when bumpers are. tipped,

And our napkins are dipped
In the gilded old rose-water bason,

Wc ’ll drink to A. E.

Whom we still hope to see
Some day as an Accepted Mason.

On Passing the London Tavern.

As the Annual Dinner of the “ United Cooks Pension
Society ” is to be served up this month, may we ask, with-
out being suspected of quizzing, Avkether provision is not
made for Single Cooks also ? Another little singularity.
The two first names on the list of Stewards are Game
and Pill. Game, of course, at a cook’s feast, is highly
desirable ; but a Pill, a Dinner Pill-

experience teaches.

Carlton Smith, the great Election agent, seeing “ Un-
redeemed Pledge Warehouse ” painted over a shop-front,
sighed to think of the number of Members avIio must have
deposits there. _

Why are Curds like the Opposite House? Because they
Wagstaffe considers the railway close to his cottage an in-funnel nuisance. are over the Whey.