EZRA:
Well, we’d our time of it,
Fools, or no fools. And you could laugh in those days,
And didn’t snigger like the ginger fizgig.
Your voice was a bird’s: but you laugh little now;
And--well, maybe, your voice is still a bird’s.
There’s birds and birds. Then, ’twas a cushy-doo’s
That’s brooding on her nest, while the red giglet’s
Was a gowk’s at the end of June. Do you call to mind
We sat the livelong day in a golden carriage,
Squandering a fortune, forby the tanner I dropt?
They wouldn’t stop to let me pick it up;
And when we alighted from the roundabout,
Some skunk had pouched it: may he pocket it
Red-hot in hell through all eternity!
If I’d that fortune now safe in my kist!
But I was a scatterpenny: and you were bonnie--
Pink as a dog-rose were your plump cheeks then:
Your hair’d the gloss and colour of clean straw:
And when, at darkening, the naphtha flares were kindled,
And all the red and blue and gold aglitter--
Drums banging, trumpets braying, rattles craking;
And we were rushing round and round, the music--
The music and the dazzle ...

ELIZA:
Ay: that was it--
The rushing and the music and the dazzle.
Happen ’twas on a roundabout that Jim
Won Phœbe Martin.