Can You Solve This Old-Timey Riddle? #53

Published in London in 1861, Do You Give It Up? was, according to its subtitle, “A collection of the most amusing conundrums, riddles, etc., of the day.”

Some of the puzzles in this collection were already well known, and had appeared in several earlier anthologies of riddles and word games. (The famous riddle that asks what comes at “the beginning of eternity, [and] the end of time and space” had been in circulation since the 1700s at least.) Others, however, were the work of the book’s (anonymous) author, including the puzzle below.

In this riddle, the two lines of a short poem act as clues to a single solution, albeit with a twist: While the first line hints at the answer as a whole, the second describes something that can be spelled out using the same letters, just read in a slightly different way. Can you figure it out?

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