My worthy friend, if you’d list to me,
I’d teach you the way of a millionaire:
Advice costs nothing; the class is free;
And the road is smooth and the game is fair
Where dame Fortune smiles
With a woman’s wiles,
And a golden comb in the jade’s back hair.
Pray listen to me as you love your life;
The old world trips to the Oof-bird’s song:
’Tis poverty cuts like a butcher’s knife,
And the stabs of the butcher rankle long—
Say are you, at most,
Like a chap on toast,
Held over the fire on the toaster’s prong?
The prizes are not for the swift alone:
There’s small demand on your brawn or brain:
Just a cast-steel chiv, and a hunk of stone,
And a thirst that can cut and come again—
A trifle of salt,
A barrel of malt,
And four good stout pegs in a mulga plain.
My worldly friend! if you’d list to me,
You’d cease to worry of duns and bills,
And practice the one philanthropy
That works the ranch that your ego fills—
For the mugs await
At your outer gate,
And the world is crying for gilded pills.
’Tis thus the prizes are lost or won,
And thus the guerdon is bought or sold;
For the game is fair when the coins are spun,
And the “heads” show up in the aureate mould—
And where is the sin,
When the flats chip in,
In flying a “nob” for their good red gold?
Well, that is the lore that I wish to teach,
And such is the way that I want to show,
For Daphne lies on the sanded beach
’Way down by the ocean at Cottesloe,
With a barrel of “fat”
And a tall silk hat,
And a tip-top time where the houris grow.