Hot Asphalt

Good evening, all my jolly lads, I’m glad to find you well
If you’ll gather all around me, now, the story I will tell
For I’ve got a situation and begorrah and begob
I can whisper all the weekly wage of nineteen bob
'Tis twelve months come October since I left me native home
After helping them Killarney boys to bring the harvest down
But now I wear the geansaí and around me waist a belt
I’m the gaffer of the squad that makes the hot asphalt
Well, we laid it in a hollows and we laid it in the flat
And if it doesn’t last forever, sure I swear, I’ll eat me hat
Well, I’ve wandered up and down the world and sure I never felt
Any surface that was equal to the hot asphalt
The other night a copper comes and he says to me, McGuire
Would you kindly let me light me pipe down at your boiler fire?
And he planks himself right down in front, with hobnails up, till late
And says I, me decent man, you’d better go and find your bait
He ups and yells, I’m down on you, I’m up to all yer pranks
Don’t I know you for a traitor from the Tipperary ranks?
Boys, I hit straight from the shoulder and I gave him such a belt
That I knocked him into the boiler full of hot asphalt
We quickly dragged him out again and we threw him in the tub
And with soap and warm water we began to rub and scrub
But devil the thing, it hardened and it turned him hard as stone
And with every other rub, sure you could hear the copper groan
I’m thinking, says O’Reilly, that he’s lookin' like old Nick
And burn me if I am not inclined to claim him with me pick
Now, says I, it would be easier to boil him till he melts
And to stir him nice and easy in the hot asphalt
You may talk about yer sailor lads, ballad singers and the rest
Your shoemakers and your tailors but we please the ladies best
The only ones who know the way their flinty hearts to melt
Are the lads around the boiler making hot asphalt
With rubbing and with scrubbing, sure I caught me death of cold
For scientific purposes, me body it was sold
In the Kelvin grove museum, me boys, I’m hangin' in me pelt
As a monument to the Irish, making hot asphalt