The Dubliners - Hot Asphalt lyrics

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