From arrow-slits, port-holes, windows, what not,
  Their sixteen quarrels the Specials had shot
  From sixteen arblasts, their daily task;
  Why they’d to do it they didn’t ask,
  For, after they’d done it, they sat down to dinner;
  The sixteen Specials they didn’t get thinner;
  But kept quite loyal, and every day
  Asked no questions but fired away.

  Would you like me to tell you the reason why
  These sixteen Specials kept letting fly
  From eleven till one, as the Chronicle speaks? 
  They did it, my boys, to annoy the Greeks,
  Who kept up a perpetual cannonade
  On the walls, and threaten’d an escalade. 
  The sixteen Specials were so arranged
  That the shots they shot were not shots exchanged,
  But every shot so told on the foe
    The Greeks were obliged to draw it mild: 
  Diomedes—­“A fix,” Ulysses—­“No go”
    Declared it, the “king of men” cried like a child;
  Whilst the Specials, no more than a fine black Tom
  I keep to serenade Mary from
  The tiles, where he lounges every night,
  Knew nor cared what they did, and were perfectly right.

  But the fact was thus:  one Helenus,
  A man much faster than any of us,
  More fast than a gent at the top of a “bus,”
  More fast than the coming of “Per col. sus.” 
  Which Shakespeare says comes galloping,
  (I take his word for anything)
  This Helenus had a cure of souls—­
    He had cured the souls of several Greeks,
  Achilles sole or heel,—­the rolls
    Of fame (not French) say Paris:—­speaks
    Anatomist Quain thereof.  Who seeks
  May read the story from z to a;
  He has handled and argued it every way;—­
  A subject on which there’s a good deal to say. 
  His work was ever the best, and still is,
  Because of this note on the Tendo Achillis.

  This Helenus was a man well bred,
    He was up in Electricity,
    Fortification, Theology,
    aesthetics and Pugilicity;
  Celsus and Gregory he’d read;
    Knew every “dodge” of glove and fist;
  Was a capital curate, (I think I’ve said)
    And Transcendental Anatomist: 
  Well up in Materia Medica,
    Right up in Toxicology,
  And Medical Jurisprudence, that sell! 
    And the dead sell Physiology: 
  Knew what and how much of any potation
  Would get him through any examination: 
  With credit not small, had passed the Hall
  And the College——­and they couldn’t pluck him at all. 
  He’d written on Rail-roads, delivered a lecture
    Upon the Electric Telegraph,
  Had played at single-stick with Hector,
    And written a paper on half-and-half.