He Gave Credit, but in the Wrong Place.
Pork has its laureate. Mr. Nicholas Longworth, who usually takes the lid only in private from his comic gift, let that give soar and bubble in the House the other day:
Dig, brothers, dig with glee;
Dig to the bottom of the treasuree.
Shovel out the shekels for the Kissimamee,
Millions for nitrates on the Tennessee;
The South is in the saddle, you bet, by gee!
Dig, brothers, dig with glee;
Why leave a nickel in the treasuree?
Leave the accounting to William G.
He can fake up a balance to a T.
The voters are plunged in lethargee -
Dig to the bottom of the treasuree.
Mr. Longworth, with a praiseworthy but mistaken conscientiousness, acknowledged the inspiration of this really admirable poem to lie in Mark Twain's "Punch, conductor, punch with care." If Mr. Longworth will take down his copy of Mark Twain and read him again with more care he will discover that in quoting that immortal thing Mark Twain explicitly disclaims its authorship and says that he got it from a newspaper clipping. He gave it currency, but he did not know who the author was. It was, in fact, a composite, but was chiefly the work of the late Isaac H. Bromley. Mark Twain never wrote any verse, but he is persistently credited with the authorship of two metrical compositions - "Punch, conductor," and the epitaph beginning "Warm Summer wind," which was the work of Robert Richardson.
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