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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=342612" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>A Ballad Of Pikeville</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">Down in Southern Arizona where the Gila monster thrives,<br>And the 'Mescalero,' gifted with a hundred thousand lives,<br>Every hour renounces one of them by drinking liquid flame<br>The assassinating wassail that has given him his name;<br>Where the enterprising dealer in Caucasian hair is seen<br>To hold his harvest festival upon his village-green,<br>While the late lamented tenderfoot upon the plain is spread<br>With a sanguinary circle on the summit of his head;<br>Where the cactuses (or cacti) lift their lances in the sun,<br>And incautious jackass-rabbits come to sorrow as they run,<br>Lived a colony of settlers-old Missouri was the State<br>Where they formerly resided at a prehistoric date.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Now, the spot that had been chosen for this colonizing scheme<br>Was as waterless, believe me, as an Arizona stream.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The soil was naught but ashes, by the breezes driven free,<br>And an acre and a quarter were required to sprout a pea.<br>So agriculture languished, for the land would not produce,<br>And for lack of water, whisky was the beverage in use-<br>Costly whisky, hauled in wagons many a weary, weary day,<br>Mostly needed by the drivers to sustain them on their way.<br>Wicked whisky! King of Evils! Why, O, why did God create<br>Such a curse and thrust it on us in our inoffensive state?</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Once a parson came among them, and a holy man was he;<br>With his ailing stomach whisky wouldn't anywise agree;<br>So he knelt upon the _mesa_ and he prayed with all his chin<br>That the Lord would send them water or incline their hearts to gin.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Scarcely was the prayer concluded ere an earthquake shook the land,<br>And with copious effusion springs burst out on every hand!<br>Merrily the waters gurgled, and the shock which gave them birth<br>Fitly was by some declared a temperance movement of the earth.<br>Astounded by the miracle, the people met that night<br>To celebrate it properly by some religious rite;<br>And 'tis truthfully recorded that before the moon had sunk<br>Every man and every woman was devotionally drunk.<br>A half a standard gallon (says history) per head<br>Of the best Kentucky prime was at that ceremony shed.<br>O, the glory of that country! O, the happy, happy folk.<br>By the might of prayer delivered from Nature's broken yoke!<br>Lo! the plains to the horizon all are yellowing with rye,<br>And the corn upon the hill-top lifts its banners to the sky!<br>Gone the wagons, gone the drivers, and the road is grown to grass,<br>Over which the incalescent Bourbon did aforetime pass.<br>Pikeville (that's the name they've given, in their wild, romantic way,<br>To that irrigation district) now distills, statistics say,<br>Something like a hundred gallons, out of each recurrent crop,<br>To the head of population-and consumes it, every drop!</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=Ambrose+Bierce">Ambrose Bierce</a><div class=q>
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<script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=342612" data-title="A Ballad Of Pikeville de Ambrose Bierce" data-description="Down in Southern Arizona where the Gila monster thrives,
And the 'Mescalero,' gifted with a hundred thousand lives,
Every hour renounces one of them by drinking liquid flame
The assassinating wassail that has given him his name;
Where the enterpri..."></div>
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