Judge — April 29, 1922 — page 14: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

OTHER HUBBARD, saintly woman, to the kitchen cupboard went, and her bow-wow, al- most human, heaved a bark of deep content. For the dog was spent with hunger, tired of eating grass and hay; in the days when dogs were younger bones more often came their way. For a bone old Mother Hub- bard searched the high and broad; through the upper shelves she rubber- ed, through the lower shelves she pawed; but there was no bone or liver, so she closed the cupboard door, and her tears ran in a river, as_ she cried, “We're sold once more. Poor old Bruno, you are cupboard, hollow, and there’s no re- lief in sight, for there's nothing here to swallow, and my stand-off is a fright. “You are hungry, but consider! Think of all my troubles, pup! I am but a lonely widder, and I'm busted, digging up. Digging up, and digging faster, till I'm always in the lurch; digging up to help the pastor put a steeple on his church Digging up to aid carousers who would walk the narrow way, digging up to send new trousers to the heathen in Cathay. Digging up to help a mother who's evicted from her flat, digging up for which and t'other, dig- ging up for this and that. “Oh, it is an age of digging, giving coin for useless fads, and we get a public wigging if we do not shell the scads. Long ago a lonely widder earned her money every day, and no freak would come and kid her till she gave her roll away. But these present times deject her, she dislikes the mod- ern curves, for the blamed old tax col- lector takes the bone her dog deserves. “To her cottage comes the stranger, saying, with a lordly mien, ‘We desire to teach the granger how to keep his whiskers clean; for his beard is always clotted with a lot of burs in bloom, Old Mother Hubbard By Watt Mason Ittustration By Henry J. Peck and those whiskers should be swatted with a sanitary broom. We shall clear his upper rigging, make his gal- ways shine and gleam; so get busy, madam, digging, for this truly noble scheme. If you try to cut up capers, you will shortly have the blues, for we'll publish in the papers names o all who may refuse.” “Then there comes a_ spinster stately, who would build a home for ducks; and she says, ‘You'll please me greatly if you dig up twenty bucks. Oh, the homeless ducks are quacking, you may see them drill along, and we need financial backing if we’d make their lives a song. You'll repent, it may be hinted, if to dig up you refuse, 12 Digging up to help the pastor put a steeple on his church. for your name will then be printed in the Bughouse Beldames’ News.’ “And the doctor and the rector know some sufferers bereft; and the blamed old tax collector takes what- ever may be left. Every person is a bidder for a handout, great or small; and a poor old lonely widder has no blooming chance at all. Oh, I’ve often wept and blubbered for a long and ghastly time, for it’s ‘Dig up, Mrs. Hubbard!’ every time I get a dime. “So you see, poor hungry critter, how unfortunate things be, and if life to you is bitter, it is doubly so to me. Vinegar, and never nectar, is the drink I must consume, and the blamed old tax collector fills my dragging days with gloom.”