[Editor: One of a series of “Songs for the Miners” published in The Empire, 1851.]
Songs for the Miners.
No. IV.
[Our late Devil was overheard singing the following song the last thing before he started for the Diggings.]
Believe me, if all those enticing long yams,
Which I hear the boys spinning to-day,
Were to tempt all beside to forsake their consarns,
Like a trump at my duty I’d stay :
Thou would’st find I should act, as I now do, my part,
Let the gold-diggers say what they will ;
For around this dear Office each trick of my art
Would unfold itself faithfully still.
It is not while pressman and typos remain,
And thy sheet every morning appears,
That the goodness and skill of thy imp are made plain,
To whom change still thy service endears !
Oh! the Devil that loves his art never forgets,
But is always urged back to his place,
As the typo returns the Bourgeois which he sets
To its box once again in the case.
Source:
The Empire (Sydney, NSW), Friday 30 May 1851, page 491 (page 3 of that issue)
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