THE RHYME OF THE BASSINETTE.

Vanity Fair (UK), January 19, 1905
 

(“It is time that some attempt was made to regulate the wheeling of bassinettes on the footway in the suburbs. These vehicles swarm in such numbers as to constitute a positive nuisance.”—Daily Paper.)

OH, the sun is shining gaily, soft and balmy is the breeze,
 But the bassinette is standing on the pavement.
Oh, the grass is long and verdant, and the leaves are on the trees,
 And the bassinette, alas! is on the pavement.
Oh, that quadricyclic monster, how it poisons our delight;
How it turns the brightest, fairest day to darkest, murkiest night;
How it sheds upon Suburbia a subtle, grisly blight,
 That bassinette that stands upon the pavement.

Just mark the weary worker, as he travels back from town
 To the bassinette that stands upon the pavement.
If you watch his features carefully, you’re sure to see a frown
 When he sights the bassinette upon the pavement.
Observe his painful struggles, with what lack of true success
His opinion of the matter he endeavours to express;
To-morrow he’ll be writing for immediate redress
 To the Press on “Bassinettes upon the Pavement.”

I hate the bloated baby. How I quail when he appears,
 When his bassinette approaches on the pavement.
I know that when he sees me he invariably sneers:
 I have watched his bassinette upon the pavement.
His cold, displeased expression always leads me to suppose
That my tie is creeping upwards, or I’ve smuts upon my nose.
Then he sniffs, as though I bored him, and his eyelids gently close,
 And the bassinette rolls by upon the pavement.

Ye men of Upper Tooting, ay, of Clapham too, and Penge,
 The bassinette still stands upon the pavement.
Ye thirst, I know, as I do, for a terrible revenge
 On the bassinette that stands upon the pavement.
With a cheery cry of havoc let us loose the dogs of war:
Let us stick at nothing. Violence? Why, bless you, yes, and gore.
Let us tear it into fragments—ay, a thousand, two, and more—
 That bassinette that stands upon the pavement.

At the subsequent proceedings, if the Judge should prove unkind
 Concerning our manœuvres on the pavement,
Whatever be the sentence that he passes never mind:
 Our duty has been done upon the pavement.
And you’ll feel as you are riding in the gloomy prison-van
To a lengthy spell of skilly and of bread that’s mainly bran,
That your toil has not been fruitless. You’ll have freed your fellow-man
 From the worst of all the perils of the pavement.

P. G. Wodehouse.