Explore "Stockings or Scales" by Oliver Herford on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
If I were asked of all things what I most would like to be, / I'd choose to be a mermaid and live below the sea.
How nice, instead of walking, to swim around like little whales, / And to wear, instead of stockings, many shiny pairs of scales, / Which don't need changing every time that nurse says they are wet.
And then to have no shoes that always come untied! -- and yet --
And yet, although it must be nice to swim around in scales, / To attend a school of porpoises and play at tag with whales, / To be on friendly speaking terms with jellyfish and eels, / And never to be sent to bed or told I'm late for meals; / Still, when I think of Christmas Eve my resolution fails, / _How could I hang my stockings up if I had only scales? _