The Mayor of Scuttleton

By Mary Mapes Dodge 1831–1905

The Mayor of Scuttleton burned his nose

Trying to warm his copper toes;

He lost his money and spoiled his will

By signing his name with an icicle-quill;

He went bare-headed, and held his breath,

And frightened his grandame most to death;

He loaded a shovel, and tried to shoot,

And killed the calf in the leg of his boot;

He melted a snow-bird, and formed the habit

Of dancing jigs with a sad Welsh rabbit;

He lived on taffy, and taxed the town;

And read his newspaper upside down;

Then he sighed, and hung his hat on a feather,

And bade the townspeople come together;

But the worst of it all was, nobody knew

What the Mayor of Scuttleton next would do.

Source: She Wields a Pen: American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century (University of Iowa Press, 1997)

Biography

Poet Mary Mapes Dodge was born into an academic family in New York, and was educated at home by tutors. At 20 she married a lawyer with whom she had two children. After her husband’s death seven years later, Dodge began her writing career to support her sons. Dodge’s most famous children’s novel, Hans Brinker; or, The Silver Skates (1865), was inspired by historian John Lothrop Motley’s The Rise of the Dutch Republic and The . . .

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