The Burglar

From The Topeka State Journal, April 29, 1914. By Roy K. Moulton.

It was near midnight’s holy hour,
    In vain we courted sleep;
The shadders was a-dancing round
    And made our nerves all creep,
When suddenly we heard a sound,
    A soft step on the stair;
We gazed into the hall, and lo,
    A burglar bold was there.

He acted perfectly at home,
    And never noticed us;
He went about his business
    Without the slightest fuss.
He must have known he was observed,
    Of that we could have vowed,
For when he took some of our stuff
    We chuckled right out loud.

When ma-in-law’s false teeth he took
    We smiled chuck full of glee.
This burglar was a kind gazabo,
    A jolly rogue was he.
And when he took Bill’s phonograph
    And dropped it in his sack,
We laughed so loud we could be heard
    To Timbuktu and back.

He carried off our coo-coo clock,
    And it ne’er more will tell
Of our arrival nightly and
    Sound our domestic knell.
And when he took our wife’s pink hat,
    We hate from tip to brim,
We felt like getting out of bed
    And shaking hands with him.

He took our parrot and we yelled
    Aloud in fiendish mirth,
And then got up and helped him pack
    For all that we were worth.
We handed him a good cigar
    And made him promise that
Whenever he came ‘round this way
    He’d burglarize our flat.