Lost Bab ballads :: :: University of Virginia Library

When your clothes, from your hat to your socks,
Have tickled and scrubbed you all day;
When your brain is a musical box
With a barrel that turns the wrong way;
When you find you're too big for your coat,
And a great deal too small for your vest,
With a pint of warm oil in your throat,
And a pound of tin-tacks in your chest;
When you've got a beehive in your head,
And a sewing machine in each ear;
And you feel that you've eaten your bed,
And you've got a bad headache down here;
When your lips are like underdone paste,
And you're highly gamboge in the gill;
And your mouth has a coppery taste,
As if you'd just bitten a pill;
When everything spins like a top,
And your stock of endurance gives out;
If some miscreant proposes a chop
(Mutton-chop, with potatoes and stout),
When your mouth is of flannel—like mine—
And your teeth not on terms with their stumps,
And spiders crawl over your spine,
And your muscles have all got the mumps;

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When you're bad with the creeps and the crawls,
And the shivers, and shudders, and shakes,
And the pattern that covers the walls
Is alive with black-beetles and snakes;
When you doubt if your head is your own,
And you jump when an open door slams,
And you've got to a state which is known
To the medical world as “jim-jams,”—
If such symptoms you find
In your body or head
They're not easy to quell
You may make up your mind
That you're better in bed,
For you're not at all well!