Nothing to Eat

Thomas Chandler Haliburton

Horatio Alger

Horatio Alger, Thomas Chandler Haliburton

Nothing to Eat

“I’ll nibble a little at what I have got.”

—“My appetite’s none of the best.

And so I must pamper the delicate thing."

—The least mite will suffice:

A side bone and dressing and bit of the breast.

The tip of the rump—that’s it—and one of the fli’s"

The Argument

THOUGH famine prevails not at all in the city;

Though none of starvation have died in the street;

Yet many there are now exciting our pity,

Who’re daily complaining of nothing to eat.

The every-day cry and the every-day fare,

That’s every day heard where the Livewells are dining,

Is nothing to eat, or else nothing to wear,

Which naked and starving rich Merdles are whining.

There’s Kitty Malone—Mrs. Merdle �tis now—

Was ever on earth here before such a sinner;

Protesting, excusing and swearing a vow,

She’d nothing worth eating to give us for dinner.

Why Kitty, if starving for want of a meal,

And had’nt a cent in the world to buy meat,

You wouldn’t exclaim with a more pious zeal,

“I’m dying of hunger—we’ve nothing to eat!!”

The Proof—the Queen of Fashion

The point I advance, if it need confirmation,

I’ll prove by a witness that few will dispute,

A pink of perfection and truth in the naion

Where fashion and folly are all of a suit.

�Tis “Merdle the banker”—or rather his wife,

Whose fashion, religion, or music, or dress,

Is followed, consulted, by many through life,

As pilots are followed by ships in distress;

For money’s a pilot, a master, a king,

Which men follow blindly through quicksands and shoals,

Where pilots their ships in a moment might fling

To destruction the vessel and cargo and souls.

�Twas money made Kitty of fashion the queen,

And fortune oft lends queens the scepter;

So fortune and fashion with this one we’ve seen

Her money and fortune in fashion has kept her;

While slaves of the queen with her hoops rules the day,

Expanding their utmost extent of expansion,

And mandates of fashion most freely obey,

And would if it bid all their souls to extinction.

The Object aimed at

But what “lady patron” as queen holds the sway;

Or sweeping, whose hoops in the street are most sweeping;

The burthen is not of this truth-telling lay,

That should in its reading the world set to weeping,

While telling the suff’rings from head to the feet,

Of poor human beings with nothing to eat.

What another Poet did

Another expounder of life’s thorny mazes

Excited our pity at fortune’s hard fare,

And troubled the city’s most troublesome places,

While singing his ditty of “Nothing to Wear.”

“A tale worth the telling,”’ though I tell for the same,

Great objects of pity we see in the street,

“With nothing to wear, though a legion by name,

Is not to buy clothing, but something to eat.

How the Author sometimes Dines

And now by your leave I will try to expound it,

In truth as it is and the way that I found it.

My dinner, sometimes, like things transcendental

And things more substantial, like women and wine

A thing is, uncertain, and quite accidental,

And sometimes I wonder, “Oh! where shall I dine?”

It was when reflecting one evening of late,

What tavern or hotel or dining-room skinner,

With table cloth dirty and dirtier plate,

Would give me a nausea and call it a dinner,

I met with Jack Merdle, a name fully known

As good for a million in Stock-gamblers’ Street,

Where none but a nabob or forger high flown

With “bulls” or with “bears” need look for a seat.

Merdle the Banker

Now Merdle this day having toss’d with his horns

The bears that were pulling so hard at the stocks,

And gored every bull that was treading his corns,

Had lined all his pockets with “plenty of rocks,”

And home now was driving at “two forty” speed,

Where dinner was waiting—“a jolly good feed.”

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