JACK J ONES was a toper: they say that somehow
He'd a foot always ready to kick up a row;
And, when half-seas over, a quarrel he pick'd
To keep up the row he had previously kick'd.

He spent all, then borrow'd at twenty per cent;
His mistress fought shy when his money was spent,
So he went for a soldier; he could not do less,
And scorn'd his fair Fanny for hugging brown Bess.

“Halt—wheel into line!” and “Attention—Eyes right!”
Put Bacchus, and Venus, and Momus to flight:
But who can depict half the sorrows he felt
When he dyed his mustachois and pipe-clayed his belt?

When Sergeant Rattan, at Aurora's red peep,
Awaken'd his tyros by bawling, “Two deep!”
Jack Jones would retort, with a half-suppress'd sigh,
“Ay, too deep by half for such ninnies as I.”

Quoth Jones, “'Twas delightful the bushes to beat,
With a gun in my hand, and a dog at my feet:
But the game at the Horse-Guards is different, good lack!
'Tis a gun in my hand, and a cat at my back.”

To Bacchus, his saint, our dejected Recruit,
One morn, about drill-time, thus proffer'd his suit—
“O make me a sparrow, a wasp, or an ape—
All's one, so I get at the juice of the grape.”

The god was propitious—he instantly found
His ten toes distend and take root in the ground;
His back was a stem, and his belly was bark,
And his hair in green leaves overshadow'd the park.

Grapes clustering hung o'er his grenadier cap,
His blood became juice, and his marrow was sap:
Till nothing was left of the muscles and bones
That form'd the identical toper, Jack Jones.

Transform'd to a vine, he is still seen on guard,
At his former emporium in Great Scotland Yard;
And still, though a vine, like his fellow-recruits,
He is train'd, after listing, has ten-drills, and shoots.