And I wiped my mouth and said, "It is well that they are dead, For I know my work is right and theirs was wrong." But my Totem saw the shame; from his ridgepole shrine he came, And he told me in a vision of the night : "There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, And every single one of them is right!" Then the silence closed upon me till They put new clothing on me Of whiter, weaker flesh and bone more frail; And I stepped beneath Time's finger once again a tribal singer And a minor poet certified by Tr—l. Still they skirmish to and fro, men my messmates on the snow, When we headed off the aurochs turn for turn; When the rich Allobrogenses never kept amanuenses, And our only plots were piled in lakes at Berne. Still a cultured Christian age sees us scuffle, squeak, and rage, Still we pinch and slap and jabber-scratch and dirk ; Still we let our business slide—as we dropped the halfdressed hide To show a fellow-savage how to work. Still the world is wondrous large,-seven seas from marge to marge,— And it holds a vast of various kinds of man ; And the wildest dreams of Kew are the facts of Khat mandhu And the crimes of Clapham chaste in Martaban. Here's my wisdom for your use, as I learned it when the moose And the reindeer roared where Paris roars to-night : There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, And-every-single-one-of-them-is-right. THE LEGEND OF EVIL I THIS is the sorrowful story Told when the twilight fails And the monkeys walk together Holding each other's tails. 'Our fathers lived in the forest, 'Foolish people were they, "They went down to the cornland "To teach the farmers to play. 'Our fathers frisked in the millet, 'Our fathers skipped in the wheat, 'Our fathers hung from the branches, 'Our fathers danced in the street. 'Then came the terrible farmers, 'And set them to labour too! Copyright, 1892, by Macmillan & Co. 107 'Set them to work in the cornland 'With ploughs and sickles and flails, 'Put them in mud-walled prisons 'And-cut off their beautiful tails! 'Now, we can watch our fathers, 'Sullen and bowed and old, 'Stooping over the millet, 'Sharing the silly mould. 'Driving a foolish furrow, 'We may not speak to our fathers, 'For if the farmers knew "They would come up to the forest 'And set us to labour too!' This is the horrible story Told as the twilight fails II 'TWAS when the rain fell steady an' the Ark was pitched an' ready, That Noah got his orders for to take the bastes below; He dragged them all together by the horn an' hide an' feather, An' all excipt the Donkey was agreeable to go. Thin Noah spoke him fairly, thin talked to him sevarely, An' thin he cursed him squarely to the glory av the Lord: 'Divil take the ass that bred you, and the greater ass that fed you— Divil go wid you, ye spalpeen!' an' the Donkey went aboard. But the wind was always failin', an' 'twas most onaisy sailin', An' the ladies in the cabin couldn't stand the stable air; |