Hang garlands on the bathroom door;
Let all the passages be spruce;
For, lo, the victim comes once more,
And, ah, he struggles like the deuce!

Bring soaps of many scented sorts;
Let girls in pinafores attend,
With John, their brother, in his shorts,
To wash their dusky little friend.

Their little friend, the dusky dog,
Short-legged and very obstinate,
Faced like a much-offended frog,
And fighting hard against his fate.

No Briton he! From palace-born
Chinese patricians he descends;
He keeps their high ancestral scorn;
His spirit breaks, but never bends.

Our water-ways he fain would'scape;
He hates the customary bath
That thins his tail and spoils his shape,
And turns him to a fur-clad lath;

And, seeing that the Pekinese
Have lustrous eyes that bulge like buds,
He fain would save such eyes as these,
Their owner's pride, from British suds.

Vain are his protests—in he goes.
His young barbarians crowd around;
They soap his paws, they soap his nose;
They soap wherever fur is found.

And soon, still laughing, they extract
His limpness from the darkling tide;
They make the towel's roughness act
On back and head and dripping side.

They shout and rub and rub and shout—
He deprecates their odious glee—
Until at last they turn him out,
A damp gigantic bumble-bee.

Released, he barks and rolls, and speeds
From lawn to lawn, from path to path,
And in one glorious minute needs
More soapsuds and another bath.