К мяснику обратился бедняк
С просьбой кость ему дать — просто так!
Но остался он «с носом»,
Получив в нос — подносом.
О! Жесток бессердечный кулак!
Оригинал:
A butcher there was at Athlone,
Whom a beggar once ask'd for a bone;
But he drove him away
With a blow of his tray --
O! his heart was as hard as a stone.
____________ From «Anecdotes and Adventures of Fifteen Gentlemen» 1821.
(This is the second earliest known book of the verses now known as limericks. Its author seems to have been Richard Scrafton Sharpe,
and the drawings were later acknowledged as being by Robert Cruikshank.)