American Old Time Song Lyrics: 37 Our Boardinghouse

Theater, Music-Hall, Nostalgic, Irish & Historic Old Songs, Volume 37

OUR BOARDINGHOUSE.
written and Sung by Herbert M. Porter.

We've got a room in a boarding-house;
In this place it's quiet as a mouse.
The room we're in is too small to wash your face,
And we're too lazy for to get another place.
The other night they made a raid;
Hunted all over for the chambermaid.
The landlord, he's a beauty sight,
Has the 'mare 'most every night.
There's a man comes in as often as be likes;
I threw at him a pound of spikes.
To get to our room you go up eleven flight of stairs!
In our room there are no chairs;
Seven boarders sleep in one bed;
When you get up in the morning, six are dead.
The porter's always full of work;
The other day they used him for a clerk.

The landlord's daughter, whose name is Floss',
Her face is full of Irish moss.
The cook, she tries to run the place;
Oh, you ought to see her face!
We get beans that are twenty years old;
The butter we get is full of mold.
In this place, if you mentioned pie,
They'd all get sick; you'd think they'd die.
The steak it's as tough as leather,
You ought to see it in dry weather;
The other day I took a chunk
To make a hinge upon my trunk,
There's two girls sleep in the next room to us;
If we should see them we'd make a fuss.
When the landlord goes to bed,
He puts cracked ice upon his head.

The other night I tried to close my eyes.
In then came a regiment of flies.
The other day I thought I'd roam-
We stumbled right into my old home.
We ate every thing they had in the place;
Bit a big piece out of my mother-in-law's face.
We swallowed the clock, bit a hole in the floor,
Chewed a hole in the roof and swallowed the door;
chewed our shoes and a big straw hat.
Made a raid on the kitchen and swallowed the cat.
We chewed fish-bones and ate ten stones,
And chewed a big piece out of the servant girl's nose.
We ate so much that it made us thin:
Our hair came out and our cheeks went in;
Our bones were sticking through our skin,
We went out and laid on red-hot tin.

We struck New York City one fine day,
So we took a walk along Broadway.
The first thing we chanced to meet
Was a German band coming down the street;
We picked up the bass drum, swallowed it down,
Swallowed the men as they drew around;
Went down to the ferry and swallowed ten boats.
Went out on election and chewed up our votes.
At last we struck Germantown,
Met a preacher and swallowed him down,
Swallowed a pump, put our teeth through the handle
Ate the reports of the Germantown scandal.

Then getting disgusted with grub so light,
We swallowed ourselves clean out of sight.
And that's the way we used to carry on
In the boarding-house where we were born.