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From Rude Rural Rhymes by Bob Adams, New York: The Macmillan Company; 1925; pp. 204-205.


[204]

THE FEVER THERMOMETER

This bald old bard has had a flip
From what they call the five-day grip —
The same old germ our war years knew,
Except that then we called it flu,
I’ve wandered far in torrid lands,
My feet have walked on burning sands,
The tropic sun has burned my back
And baked my fair complexion black,
But nothing else was half so hot
As this here fever-heated cot.
O in my sick-bed acrobatics
I figure out my mathematics,
How many attitudes I take
In which to sweat and fret and ache.
Right side, back side, left and tum —
But all the four alike are burn.
The arms and legs in different stations
Give sixty different variations —
Each posture worse than any other
In which to growl and cuss and smother.
Anon approaches my Sultana,
Who in these rhymes is known as Hannah.
She mostly brings along with her
[205] A clinical thermometer.
I rally all my fainting powers
And suck that stick of glass for hours.
There’s naught in all the world so useless,
So mean, so tasteless and so juiceless.
My fever, Hannah claims would slump
Did I not act so like a chump.
In short so much like Andy Gump;
But nothing brings it up so quick
As that gosh dinged old fever stick.
She’ll have her way with me, I wist;
I have not gumption to resist.
But when my strength comes back a bit,
The pieces from my jaw I’ll spit.
No more I’ll lie here like a mullet
With her glass bait stuck in my gullet.






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