Up in Maine: Stories of Yankee Life Told in Verse. Holman Day

AUNT SHAW’S PET JUG

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      Now there was Uncle Elnathan Shaw,

      —Most regular man you ever saw!

      Just half-past four in the afternoon

      He’d start and whistle that old jig tune,

      Take the big blue jug from the but’ry shelf

      And trot down cellar, to draw himself

      Old cider enough to last him through

      The winter ev’nin’. Two quarts would do.

      —Just as regular as half-past four

      Come round, he’d tackle that cellar door,

      As he had for thutty years or more.

      And as regular, too, as he took that jug

      Aunt Shaw would yap through her old

      mug,

      “Now, Nathan, for goodness’ sake take care

      You allus trip on the second stair;

      It seems as though you were just possessed

      To break that jug. It’s the very best

      There is in town and you know it, too,

      And ’twas left to me by my great-aunt Sue.

      For goodness’ sake, why don’t yer lug

      A tin dish down, for ye’ll break that jug?”

      Allus the same, suh, for thirty years,

      Allus the same old twits and jeers

      Slammed for the nineteenth thousand time

      And still we wonder, my friend, at crime.

      But Nathan took it meek’s a pup

      And the worst he said was “Please shut up.”

      You know what the Good Book says befell

      The pitcher that went to the old-time well;

      Wal, whether ’twas that or his time had come,

      Or his stiff old limbs got weak and numb

      Or whether his nerves at last giv’ in

      To Aunt Shaw’s everlasting chin—

      One day he slipped on that second stair,

      Whirled round and grabbed at the empty air.

      And clean to the foot of them stairs, ker-smack,

      He bumped on the bulge of his humped old back

      And he’d hardly finished the final bump

      When old Aunt Shaw she giv’ a jump

      And screamed downstairs as mad’s a bug

      “Dod-rot your hide, did ye break my jug?”

      Poor Uncle Nathan lay there flat

      Knocked in the shape of an old cocked hat,

      But he rubbed his legs, brushed off the dirt

      And found after all that he warn’t much hurt.

      And he’d saved the jug, for his last wild thought

      Had been of that; he might have caught

      At the cellar shelves and saved his fall,

      But he kept his hands on the jug through all.

      And now as he loosed his jealous hug

      His wife just screamed, “Did ye break my

      jug?”

      Not a single word for his poor old bones

      Nor a word when she heard his awful groans,

      But the blamed old hard-shelled turkle just

      Wanted to know if that jug was bust.

      Old Uncle Nathan he let one roar

      And he shook his fist at the cellar door;

      “Did ye break my jug?” she was yellin’ still.

      “No, durn yer pelt, but I swow I will.”

      And you’d thought that the house was a-going

      to fall

      When the old jug smashed on the cellar wall.