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And e'en as he looked on the Thing where It lay 'Twixt the winking new spoons and the napkins'

array,

The freed mind fled back to the long-ago daysThe hand-to-hand scuffle - the smoke and the

blaze

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The forced march at night and the quick rush at dawn

The banjo at twilight, the burial ere morn—

The stench of the marshes-the raw, piercing smell When the overhand stabbing-cut silenced the yell

The oaths of his Irish that surged when they stood

Where the black crosses hung o'er the Kuttamow flood.

As a derelict ship drifts away with the tide

The Captain went out on the Past from his Bride,

Back, back, through the springs to the chill of the

year,

When he hunted the Boh from Maloon to Tsaleer.

As the shape of a corpse dimmers up through deep water,

In his eye lit the passionless passion of slaughter,

And men who had fought with O'Neil for the life Had gazed on his face with less dread than his wife.

For she who had held him so long could not hold him

Though a four-month Eternity should have controlled him—

But watched the twin Terror-the head turned to

head

The scowling, scarred Black, and the flushed savage Red

The spirit that changed from her knowing and

flew to

Some grim hidden Past she had never a clue to.

But It knew as It grinned, for he touched it unfearing,

And muttered aloud, 'So you kept that jade earring!'

Then nodded, and kindly, as friend nods to friend, 'Old man, you fought well, but you lost in the end.'

The visions departed, and Shame followed Pas

sion :

'He took what I said in this horrible fashion,

'I'll write to Harendra!' With language unsainted

The Captain came back to the Bride . . . who

had fainted.

!

And this is a fiction? No. Go to Simoorie

And look at their baby, a twelve-month old Houri,

A pert little, Irish-eyed Kathleen Mavournin—
She's always about on the Mall of a mornin'-

And you'll see, if her right shoulder-strap is displaced,

This: Gules upon argent, a Boh's Head, erased!

THE LAMENT OF THE BORDER

CATTLE THIEF

O WOE is me for the merry life

I led beyond the Bar,

And a treble woe for my winsome wife

That weeps at Shalimar.

They have taken away my long jezail,

My shield and sabre fine,

And heaved me into the Central Jail

For lifting of the kine.

The steer may low within the byre,
The Jut may tend his grain,

But there'll be neither loot nor fire

Till I come back again.

And God have mercy on the Jut

When once my fetters fall,

K

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