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30 Nov 24 - 05:13 AM (#4212558) Subject: Lyr Add: The Magic Wand From: Monologue John THE MAGIC WAND A School Board Officer's Story by George R Sims Horrible den's Sir aren't they This is one of my daily rounds In here in such awful places That child life most abounds We ferret from roof to basement In search of our tiny prey Were down on their homes directly If they happen to stop away Knock at the Door ? Pooh nonsense They wouldn't know what nit meant Come in and look about you They'l think you're a school board gent Did you ever see such hovels ? Dirty and damp and small Look at the rotten flooring Look at the Filthy wall That's lucky the place is empty The whole of the family is out This is one of me fav'rit cases Just give a glance about There;s a father and four young children And Sally the eldest's eight They're horribly poor – half starving And they live in a shocking state The Father gets drunk and beats them The Mother she deid last year There's a story about her dying I fancy you'd like to hear She was one of our backward pupils Was Sally the eldest child A poor little London blossom That the alley had not defiled She was on at the lane last winter She played in the pantomime A lot of our School Board children Get on at the Christmas time She was one of a group of fairies And her wand was the wand up there There in the filthy corner Behind the broken chair The gilt of the star is faded And the tinsel's peeled away But once in the glaring lime-light It gleamed like a jewelled spray A fairy's wand in a lodging In a slum like this looks queer But you'll guess why they let her keep it When you know why the wand came here Her Mother was ill that winter Her Father the drunken sot Was spending his weekly earnings And all that the fairy got The woman lay sick and moaning Dying by slow degrees Of a cruel and wasting fever That rages in dens like these But night after night went Sally Half-starved to the splended scene Where she waved a wand of magic As a Lilliput fairy queen She stood in the Land of Shadows Where a demon worked his spell At a wave of her wand he vanished And the scene was changed as well She'd a couple of lines to utter Which bade the gloom give way To the Golden Home of Blisses In the Land of the Shining Day She gazed on the lime light splendours That grew as she waved her wand And she thought of the cheerless cellar Old Drury's walls beyond And when in her ragged garments No longer a potent fay She knelt by the retched pallet Where her dying mother lay She though as she stooped and kissed her And looked in her ghastly face Of the wand that could change a dungeon To a sweet and lovely place She was only a wretched outcast A waif of the London slums It's little of truth and knowledge To the ears of such children comes She fancied her wand was truly Possesed of a magic charm That it punished the wicked people And sheilded the good from harm Her mother grew slowly weaker The depths of the winter came And the teeth of the biting weather Seized on her wasted frame And Sally who saw her sinking Came home from the Lane one night With her shawl wrpped over something And her face a ghastly white She had hidden the wand and brought it The wand that could do so much She crept to the sleeping woman Who moved not at her touch She stooped to hear her breathing It was oh so faint and low Then raising her wand she waved it Like a fairy to and fro Her well known lines she uttered That bade the gloom give way To the Golden |Home of Blisses In the land of Shining day She murmured o Mother dearest You shall look on the splendid scene While a man from the Playhouse watched her Who had followed the fairy queen He thought she had stolen something And brought it away to sell He had followed her home and caught her And then he'd a tale to tell He told how he watched her waving The wand by her mothers bed O'er a face where the faint grey shadow Of the last long sleep had spread She's still at school is Sally And she's heard of The Realms of Light So she clings to the childish fancy That entered her head that night She say that her poor sick mother By the wand was charmed away From Earth to the Home of Blisses In the Land of Eternal Day |