THE OFFENDED SNAIL

A SNAIL, when climbing up a rose,

By thorns assaulted, pricked her nose.

She dropped, and wrote with painful scrawl
A silver sentence on the wall.

A fairy who was wondrous wise
Regarded this with beamy eyes,
And straightway with a lovely laugh
Announced the glazy autograph.

‘A rose,’ the shelly scribe had writ,
‘May be the very spice of wit ;

But ’tis not comely with a thorn
To greet a lady’s offered horn!’