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 Missis’s knife, an’ wa’n’t she mad! Didn’t much water her abuse, An’ took my on’y knife I had, Nice, dandy, new, horn-handled one; ’Cause, come to use her one, she found ’Twas gone too soft to cut a stick, Too hard to turn a screw around:— Use in it, yet it wa’n’t no use. That’s me....! My spirit’s all but broke To wish myself like usual folk, As does two right-out things in turn:— Just earns to eat, an’ eats to earn. A perfeck rose ’ll better please Your eyesight than fat cabbages: But good sound cabbage, I suppose, Is pleasinger than canker’d rose? Unless your eyes is in your nose.

Oh, ain’t there never no way out? ’Cause, see this extry use I got. Quench as you will, that truth keeps hot. My knife won’t cut, an’ yet I feel, I do! it’s extry-proper steel; An’ tons of iron ’s in my sand. ’Tain’t to make more, it’s on’y just Joggle a bit, an’ readjust? Couldn’t I be took back in hand, Run down, an’ temper’d back again, Or smelted out some patent way? I wouldn’ mind no kind o’ pain, So as my Power could get its play.