Citation
W.V. her book

Material Information

Title:
W.V. her book and various verses
Creator:
Canton, William, 1845-1926
Brock, C. E. (Charles Edmund), 1870-1938 ( illustrator )
Stone & Kimball ( Publisher )
John Wilson and Son ( Printer )
University Press (Cambridge, Mass.) ( Printer )
Place of Publication:
New York
Publisher:
Stone and Kimball
Manufacturer:
John Wilson and Son ; University Press
Publication Date:
Language:
English
Physical Description:
viii, 150, [1] p. : ill. ; 18 cm.

Subjects

Subjects / Keywords:
Parent and child -- Juvenile literature ( lcsh )
Children's poetry ( lcsh )
Children's stories ( lcsh )
Children's poetry -- 1896 ( lcsh )
Children's stories -- 1896 ( lcsh )
Bldn -- 1896
Genre:
Children's poetry
Children's stories
Spatial Coverage:
United States -- New York -- New York
United States -- Massachusetts -- Cambridge
Target Audience:
juvenile ( marctarget )

Notes

General Note:
Title page printed in red and black.
General Note:
Contans prose and verse.
Statement of Responsibility:
by William Canton ; with two illustrations by C.E. Brock.

Record Information

Source Institution:
University of Florida
Holding Location:
University of Florida
Rights Management:
This item is presumed to be in the public domain. The University of Florida George A. Smathers Libraries respect the intellectual property rights of others and do not claim any copyright interest in this item. Users of this work have responsibility for determining copyright status prior to reusing, publishing or reproducing this item for purposes other than what is allowed by fair use or other copyright exemptions. Any reuse of this item in excess of fair use or other copyright exemptions may require permission of the copyright holder. The Smathers Libraries would like to learn more about this item and invite individuals or organizations to contact The Department of Special and Area Studies Collections (special@uflib.ufl.edu) with any additional information they can provide.
Resource Identifier:
026628059 ( ALEPH )
ALG3917 ( NOTIS )
11564555 ( OCLC )

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Full Text




The Baldwin Library

KiB





& PBT ated V bee.



W. V. HER BOOK

And Various Verses



OTHER BOOKS BY SAME AUTHOR

‘THE INVISIBLE PLAYMATE”
‘CA LOST EPIC AND OTHER. POEMS””





“ Thank you, Mr. Oakman”



W. V. HER BOOK

And Various Verses

BY

WILLIAM CANTON

With T-wo Illustrations by C. E. Brock



NEW YORK
STONE & KIMBALL

M DCCC XCVI1



COPYRIGHT, 1896, BY
STONE AND KIMBALL



Contents

W. V., HER BirTHDAY .

Her Boox
The Inquisition .
The First Miracle
By the Fireside. I.
By the Fireside. II.
The Raider
Babsie-Bird ‘
The Orchard of Stars .
The Sweet Pea .
Brook-side Logic
Bubble-Blowing .
New Version of an Old cae
The Golden: Swing-Boat
Another Newton’s Apple .
Naturula Naturans .
Wings and Hands
Flowers Invisible -
Making Pansies .
Heart-ease :
‘¢Si f avais un arpent””

Her Frienp LITr.tejoHn

Her BeED-TIME .
vil

PAGE



Contents

Various VERSES Ce
Bastvote Eden: ays mrcite eens tween .3)
GoodwinvSands |) suis) Gea ee 2
Dra tell ora typeeeeve net te rateegat eet alice) 7

VIGNETTES
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The Wanderer. ID. . . . . . . 4204
pishesScarecrowiersj)- 9.) sy tions ft ie OO

The Haunted Bridge . . . «© . ~ 108
ania Qiome aig 9G 6 6 Ja io 8 0 RHO
Seas Picturess lees alee sh ony ee menTcl2,
Sea=Picturesss lly ei ien et epee one eA
II@OnNENE G6 9g 16 10 5-6, a. 9-0 BHO
Green Pastures Riirea cach ee iierak romance TLIO
The Little Dipper. . . . « «. « 4420
retire sELill siemens cue rtes oe ope eran Tso 7
Nature’s Magic ee ae 122
April Voices . . . + + 6 «© « 123
Green Sky . - 5 + 6 «© + © + 128

Susp Umsra Crucis
The Shepherd Beautiful . . . . . (131
AMG IMIG 5 660 6 6 6 oo HD
PAG Garoleaiis =e. apes etek elt a3 O
When Snow Lies Deen 5 6 6 oo BGS
sc Trees of ees Sauer er O
The Comrades. . Soi eee eerl 42)
«¢ Crying, Abba, F ther”? See aie RAS
This Grace Vouchsafe . . . . + I50

viii



HER BIRTHDAY







HER BIRTHDAY

7" are still on the rosy side of the
apple; but this is the last Saturday
in September, and we cannot expect many
more golden days between this and the cry
of the cuckoo. But what a summer we have
had, thanks to one of W. V.’s ingenious sug-
gestions! She came to us in April, when
the world is still a trifle bare and the wind
somewhat too bleak for any one to get com-
fortably lost in the Forest or cast up on a
coral reef; so we have made her birthday
a movable feast, and whenever a fine free
Saturday comes round we devote it to
thankfulness that she has been born, and
to the joy of our both being alive together.
W. V. sleeps in an eastern room, and
accordingly the sun rises on that side of the
house. Under the eaves and just above her

3



Ww. V.

window the martins have a nest plastered
against the wall, and their chattering awakens
her in the first freshness of the new morning.
She watches the black shadows of the birds
fluttering on the sunny blind, as, first one
and then another, they race up to the nest,
and vibrate in the air a moment, before dart-
ing into it. When her interest has begun to
flag, she steals in to me in her nightdress,
and tugs gently at my beard till I waken and
sit up. Unhappily her mother wakens too.
“What, more birthdays!’ she exclaims in a
tone of stern disapproval; whereat W. V.
and I laugh, for evasion of domestic law is
the sweet marjoram of our salad. But it zs
possible to coax even a Draconian parent into
assent, and oh!

Flower of the may,
If mamsie will not say her nay,
W. won’t care what any one may say!

We first make a tour of the garden, and it
is delightful to observe W. V. prying about
with happy, eager eyes, to detect whether
nature has been making any new thing during
the dim, starry hours when people are too

4



Her Birthday

sound asleep to notice; delightful to hear
her little screams of ecstasy when she has
discovered something she has not seen be-
fore. It is singular how keenly she notes
every fresh object, and in what quaint and
pretty terms of phrase she expresses her
glee and wonderment. “ Oh, father, have n’t
the bushes got their hands quite full of
flowers?”? “Aren’t the buds the trees’ little
girls?”

This morning the sun was blissfully warm,
and the air seemed alive with the sparkle of
the dew, which lay thick on every blade and
leaf. As we went round the gravel walks
we perceived how completely.all the earlier
flowers had vanished ; even the lovely sweet
peas were almost over. We have still, how-
ever, the single dahlias, and marigolds, and
-hasturtiums, on whose level leaves the dew
stood shining like globules of quicksilver ;
and the tall Michaelmas daisies make quite a
white-topped thicket along the paling, while
the rowan-berries are burning in big red
bunches over the western hedge.

In the corner near the limes we came
upon a marvellous spectacle —a huge old

5



W. V.«.

spider hanging out in his web in the sun,
like a grim old fisherman floating in the
midst of his nets at sea. A hand’s breadth
off, young bees and new-born flies were busy
with the low perennial sunflowers ; he watch-
ing them motionlessly, with his gruesome
shadow silhouetted on a leaf hard by. In
his immediate neighbourhood the fine threads
of his web were invisible, but a little distance
away one could distinguish their concentric
curves, grey on green. Every now and then
we heard the snapping of a stalk overhead,
and a leaf pattered down from the limes.
Every now and then, too, slight suzges of
breeze run shivering through the branches.
Nothing distracted the intense vigilance of
the crafty fisherman. Scores of glimmering
insects grazed the deadly snare, but none
touched it. It must have been tantalising,
but the creature’s sullen patience was invinci-
ble. W. V. at last dropped a piece of leaf-
stalk on his web, out of curiosity. In a
twinkling he was at the spot, and the frag-
ment was dislodged with a single jerk.

This is one of the things in which she
delights — the quiet observation of the ways

6



Her Birthday

of creatures. Nothing would please her
better, could she but dwarf herself into an
‘“‘aglet-baby,” than to climb into those filmy
meshes and have a chat in the sunshine with
the wily ogre. She has no mistrust, she feels
no repulsion from anything that has life.
There is a warm place in her heart for the
cool, dry toad, and she loves the horned
snail, if not for his own sake, at least for his
* darling little house ” and the silver track he
leaves on the gravel.

Of course she wanted a story about a
spider. I might have anticipated as much.
Well, there was King Robert the Bruce, who
was saved by aspider from his enemies when
they were seeking his life.

“And if they had found him, would
they have sworded off his head? Really,
father? Like Oliver Crumball did Charles
King’s?”

Her grammar was defective, but her
surmises were beyond dispute; they would.
Then there was the story of Sir Samuel
Brown, who took his idea of a suspension
bridge from a web which hung — but W. V.
wanted something much more engrossing.

7



Ww. V.~.

“Wasn’t there never no awful big spider
that made webs in the Forest?”

“And caught lions and bears?”

She nodded approvingly. Oh, yes, there
was — once upon a time.

“ And was there a little girl there?”

There must have been for the story to be
worth telling ; but the breakfast bell broke in
on the opening chapter of that little girl’s
incredible adventures.

After breakfast we followed the old birth-
day custom, and “ plunged” into the depths
of the Forest. Some persons, I have heard,
call our Forest the “East Woods,” and
report that though they are pleasant enough
in summer, they are rather meagre and
limited in area. Now, it is obvious that it
would be impossible to “ plunge” into any-
‘thing less than a Forest. Certainly, when
W. V. is with me I am conscious of the
Forest —the haunted, enchanted, aboriginal
Forest; and I see with something of her
illumined vision, the vision of W. V., who
can double for herself the comfort of a fire on
a chilly day by running into the next room

8



Her Birthday

and returning with the tidings, “It’s very
cold in the woods!”

If you are courageous enough to leave the
paths and hazard yourself among the under-
wood and the litter of bygone autumns,
twenty paces will take you to the small
Gothic doors of the Oak-men ; twenty more
to the cavern of the Great Bruin, and the
pollard tree on the top of which the foxes
live ; while yet another twenty, and you are
at the burrows of the kindliest of all insects,
the leaf-cutter bees. Once —in parenthesis
—when a little maid was weeping because
she had lost her way at dusk in the Forest
mazes, it was a leaf-cutter bee that tunnelled
a straight line through the trees, so that the
nearest road lamp, miles away, twinkled right
into the Forest, and she was able to guide her-
self home. Indeed, it will only take ten min-
utes if you do not dawdle, to get to the dread-
ful webs of the Iron Spider, and when you
do reach that spot, the wisest thing you can
do is to follow the example of the tiny
flame-elf when — match is blown out — clap
on your cap of darkness and- scuttle back to
fairyland.



W. V«.

What magical memories have we two of
the green huddle and the dreamy lawns of
that ancient and illimitable Forest! We
know the bosky dingles where we shall find
pappa trees, on whose lower branches a little
girl may discover something to eat when she
is good enough to deserve it. We know
where certain green-clad foresters keep store
of fruits which are supposed, by those who
know no better, to grow only in orchards by
tropical seas. Of course every one is aware
that in the heart of the Forest there is a
granite fountain; but only we two have
learned the secret that its water is the
Water of Heart’s-ease, and that if we con-
tinue to drink it we shall never grow really
old. We have still a great deal of the
Forest to explore; we have never reached
the glade where the dog-daisies have to
be chained because they grow so exceed-
ingly wild; nor have we found the blue
thicket — it is blue because it is so distant
—from which some of the stars come up
into the dusk when it grows late; but
when W. V. has got her galloping-horse-
bicycle we shall start with the first sun-

10



Her Birthday

shine some morning, and give the whole day
to the quest.

We lowly folk dine before most people
think of lunching, and so dinner was ready
when we arrived home. Now, as decorum
at table is one of the cardinal virtues W. V.
dines by proxy. It is her charming young
friend Gladys who gives us the pleasure of
her company. It is strange how many things
this bewildering daughter of mine can do as
Gladys, which she cannot possibly accom-
plish as W. V. W. V. is unruly, a chatter-
box, careless, or at least forgetiul, of the
elegances of the social board; whereas
Gladys is a model of manners, an angel in a
bib. W. V. cannot eat crusts, and rebels
against porridge at breakfast ; Gladys idolises
crusts, and as for porridge— “I am sur-
prised your little girl does not like porridge.
It is so good for her.”

After dinner, as I lay smoking in the gar-
den lounge to-day, I fell a-thinking of W. V.
and Gladys, and the numerous other little
maids in whom this tricksy spirite has been

II



Ww. V.

masquerading since she came into the world
five years ago. She began the small comedy
before she had well learned to balance her-
self on her feet. As she sat in the middle of
the carpet we would play at looking for the
baby— where has the baby gone? have you
seen the baby?—and, oddly enough, she
would take a part and pretend to wonder, or
perhaps actually did wonder, what had be-
come of herself, till at last we would discover
her on the floor —to her own astonishment
and irrepressible delight.

Then, as she grew older, it was amusing
to observe how she would drive away the
naughty self, turn it literally out of doors,
and return as the “Smiling Winifred.” I
presume she grew weary, as human nature is
apt to grow, of a face whichis wreathed in
amaranthine smiles ;.so the Smiling Winifred
vanished, and we were visited by various
‘sweet children with lovely names, of whom
Gladys is the latest and the most indefatiga-
ble. I cannot help laughing when I recall
my three-year-old rebel listening for a few
moments to a scolding, and when she con-
sidered that the ends of justice had been

12



Her Birthday

1?

served, exclaiming, “I put my eyes down
—which meant that so far as she was
concerned the episode was now definitively
closed.

My day-dream was broken by W. V. flying
up to me with fern fronds fastened to her
shoulders for wings. She fluttered round me,
then flopped into my lap, and put her arms
about my neck. “If I was a real swan,
father, I would cuddle your head with my
wings.”

“Ah, well, you are a real duck, Diddles,
and that will do quite as well.”

She was thinking of that tender Irish
legend of the Children of Lir, changed into
swans by their step-mother and doomed to
suffer heat and cold, tempest and hunger,
homelessness and sorrow, for nine hundred
years, till the sound of the first Christian
bell changed them again —to frail, aged
human creatures. It was always the sister,
she knows, who solaced and strengthened
the brothers beside the terrible sea of Moyle,
sheltering them under her wings and warm-
ing them against her bosom. In sucha case

13



Ww. V.

as this an only child is at a disadvantage.
Even M’rao, her furry playmate, might have
served as a bewitched brother, but after
many months of somnolent forbearance M’rao
ventured into the great world beyond our
limes, and returned no more.

Flower of the quince,
Puss once kissed Babs, and ever since
She thinks he mzzs¢ be an enchanted prince.

In a moment she was off again, an angel,
flying about the garden and in and out of the
house in the performance of helpful offices
for some one; or, perchance, a fairy, for her
heaven is a vague and strangely-peopled
region. Long ago she told me that the
moon was “put up” by a black man—a
saying which puzzled me until I came to
understand that this negro divinity could
only have been the “divine Dark” of the
old Greek poet. Of course she says her
brief, simple prayers ; but how can one con-
vey to a child’s mind any but the most
provisional and elemental conceptions of the
Invisible? Once I was telling her the story
of a wicked king, who put his trust in a fort

14



Her Birthday

of stone on a mountain peak, and scoffed at.
a prophet God had sent to warn him. “He
was n’t very wise,” said W. V., “ for God and
Jesus and the angels and the fairies are
cleverer’n we are; they have wings.” The
* cleverness ’’ of God has deeply impressed
her. He can make rain and see through
walls. She noticed some stone crosses in a
sculptor’s yard some time ago, and remarked :
“ Jesus was put on one of those ;” then, after
some reflection: “Who was it put Jesus on
the cross? Was it the church people,
father??? Well, when one comes to think
of it, it was precisely the church people —
“not these church people, dear, but the
church people of hundreds of years ago,
when Jesus was alive.” She had seen the
world’s tragedy in the stained glass windows
and had drawn her own conclusion — the
people who crucified would be the most
likely to makea picture of the crucifixion ;
Christ’s friends would want to forget it and
never to speak of it.

In the main she does not much concern
herself with theology or the unseen. She
lives in the senses. Once, indeed, she

15



Ww. V.

began to communicate some interesting re-
miniscences of what had happened “ before
she came here,” to this planet; but some-
thing interrupted her, and she has not
attempted any further revelation. There is
nothing more puzzling in the world to her,
I fancy, than an echo. She has forgotten
that her own face in the mirror was quite as
bewildering. A high wind at night is not
a pleasant fellow to have shaking your window
and muttering down your chimney; but an
intrepid father with a yard of brown oak is
more than a match for Azm. Thunder and
lightning she regards as “ great friends ; they
always come together.” She is more per-
ceptive of their companionship than of their
air of menace towards mankind. Darkness,
unless it be on the staircase, does not trouble
her: when we have said good-night out goes
the gas. But there seems to be some quality
or influence in the darkness which makes
her affectionate and considerate. Once and
again when she has slept with me and
wakened in the dead of night she has been
most apologetic and self-abasing. She is so
sorry to disturb me, she knows she is a
16



Her Birthday

bother, but wold I give her a biscuit or a
drink of water?

She has all along been a curious combina-
tion of tenderness and savagery. In a
sudden fit of motherhood she will bring me
her dolly to kiss, and ten minutes later I
shall see it lying undressed and abandoned
in a corner of the room. She is a Spartan
parent, and slight is the chance of her chil-
dren being spoiled either by sparing the rod
or lack of stern monition. It is not so long
ago that we heard a curious sound of distress
in the dining-room, and on her mother
hurrying downstairs to see what was amiss,
there was W. V. chastising her recalcitrant
babe —and doing the weeping herself. This
appeared to be a good opportunity for point-
ing a moral. It was clear now that she
knew what it was to be naughty and dis-
obedient, and if she punished these faults
so severely in her own children she must
expect me to deal with her manifold and
grievous offences in the same way. She
looked very much sobered and concerned,
but a few moments later she brought me a
stout oak walking-stick: “ Would that do,

2 14



W. V.

father?’”? She shows deep commiseration
for the poor and old; grey hairs and penury
are sad bed-fellows; but for the poor who
are not old I fear she feels little sympathy.
Perhaps we, or the conditions of life, are to
blame for this limitation of feeling, for when
we spoke to her of certain poor little girls
with no mothers, she rejoined: “Why don’t
you take them, then?” Our compassion
which stopped short of so simple a remedy
must have ‘seemed suspiciously like a
pretence.

To me one of the chief wonders of child-
hood has been the manner in which this
young person has picked up words, has
learned to apply them, has coined them for
herself, and has managed to equip herself
with a stock of quotations. When she was
yet little more than two and a half years old
she applied spontaneously the name Dapple-
grey to her first wooden horse. Then
Dapple-grey was pressed into guardianship
of her sleeping dolls, with this stimulative
quotation: “Brave dog, watching by the
baby’s bed.” There was some vacillation, I
recollect, as to whether it was a laburnum or

18



Her Birthday

a St. Bernard that saved travellers in the
snow, but that was exceptional. The word
“twins ’’ she adapted prettily enough. Try-
ing once in an emotional moment to put her
love for me into terms of gold currency, she
added: “And I love mother just the same ;
you two are twins, you know.” A little while
after the University boat race she drew my
attention to a doll in a _ shop-window:
“Ts n’t it beautiful? And look at its Oxford
eyes!” To “fussle one,” to disturb one by
making a fuss, seems at once fresh and use-
ful; “sorefully” is an acutely expressive
adverb; when you have to pick your steps
in wet weather the road may be conveniently
described as “ picky ;” don’t put wild roses
on the cloth at dinner lest the maid should
“crumb” them away; and when one has a
cold in the head how can one describe the
condition of one’s nose except as “‘ hoarse”?
“Lost in sad thought,” “ Now I have some-
thing to my heart’s content,” “ Few tears are
my portion,” are among the story-book
phrases which she has assimilated for week-
day use. When she was being read to out
of Kingsley’s “Heroes,” she asked her

uo)



Ww. V.

mother to substitute “the Ladies’’ for “ the’
Gorgons.” She did not like the sound of
the word; “it makes me,” drawing her
breath with a sort of shiver through her
teeth, “it makes me pull myself together.”
Once when she broke into a sudden laugh, for
sheer glee of living I suppose, she explained :
“Tam just like a little squirrel biting myself.”
Her use of the word “live” is essential
poetry; the spark “lives” inside the flint,
the catkins “live” in the Forest; and she
pointed out to me the “lines” down a
horse’s legs where the blood “lives.” A
sign-board on a piece of waste land caused
her some perplexity. It was not “ The pub-
lic are requested ” this time, but “ Forbidden
to shoot rubbish here.” Either big game or
small deer she could have understood ; but
— “Who wants to shoot rubbish, father?”

Have I sailed out of the trades into the
doldrums in telling of this commonplace
little body ? — for, after all, she is merely the
average healthy, merry, teasing, delightful
mite who tries to take the whole of life at
once into her two diminutive hands. Ah,

20



Her Birthday

well, I want some record of these good, gay
days of our early companionship ; something
that may still survive when this right hand is
dust ; a testimony that there lived at least
one man who was joyously content with the
small mercies which came to him in the
beaten way of nature. For neither of us,
little woman, can these childish, hilarious
days last much longer now. Five arch,
happy faces look out at me from the sections
of an oblong frame; all W. V.’s, but no two
the same W. V. The sixth must go. into
another frame. You must say good-bye to
the enchanted Forest, little lass, and travel -
into strange lands; and the laws of infancy
are harder than the laws of old Wales. For
these ordained that when a person remained
in a far country under such conditions that
he could not freely revisit his own, his title
to the ancestral soil was not extinguished
till the ninth man; the ninth man could
utter his “cry over the abyss,” and save his
portion. But when you have gone into the
world beyond, and can no more revisit the
Forest freely, no ear will ever listen to your
‘cry over the abyss.”
21



Ww. V.

When she had at last tired herself with
angelic visits and thrown aside her fern
wings, she returned to me and wanted to
know if I would play at shop. No, I would
not play at shop; I would be neither pur-
chaser nor proprietor, the lady she called
“Cash” nor the stately gentleman she called
“Sion.” Would I be a king, then, and
refuse my daughter to her (she would be a
prince) unless: she built a castle in a single
night; “better’n’t” she bring her box of
bricks and the dominoes? No, like Cesar,
I put by the crown. She took my refusals
cheerfully. On the whole, she is tractable
in these matters. “Fathers,” she once told
me, “know better than little girls, don’t
they?” “Oh, dear, no! how could they?
Fathers have to go into the city; they don’t
go to school like little girls.” Doubtless
there was something in that, but she per-
sisted, ‘Well, even if little girls do go to
school, fathers are wiser and know best.”
From which one father at least may derive
encouragement. Well, would I blow soap-
bubbles?

I think it was the flying thistledown in

22



Her Birthday

June which first gave us the cue of the soap-
bubbles. What a delightful game it is; and
there is a knack, too, in blowing these
spheres of fairy glass and setting them off
on their airy flight. Till you have blown
bubbles you have no conception how full of
. waywardness and freakish currents the air is.
Oh, you who are sad at heart, or weary of
thought, or irritable with physical pain, coax,
beg, borrow, or steal a four or five year old,
and betake you to blowing bubbles in the
sunshine of your recluse garden. Let the
breeze be just a little brisk to set your
bubbles drifting. Fill some of them with
tobacco smoke, and with the wind’s help
bombard the old fisherman in his web. As
the opaline globes break and the smoke
escapes in a white puff along the grass or
among the leaves, you shall think of historic
battlefields, and muse whether the greater
game was not quite as childish as this, and
“sorefully ”’ less innocent. The charges of
smoke are only a diversion ; it is the crystal
balls which delight most. The colours of
all the gems in the world run molten through
their fragile films. And what visions they

23



Ww. V.

contain for crystal-gazers! Among the gold
and green, the rose and blue, you see the
dwarfed reflection of your own trees and
your own home floating up into the sunshine.
These are your possessions, your surroundings
—so lovely, so fairylike in the bubble; in
reality so prosaic and so inadequate when
one considers the rent and rates. To W.
V. the bubbles are like the wine of the poet
— discoveries,”

Flower of the sloe
When chance annuls the worlds we blow,
Where does the soul of beauty in them go?

“Tell me a story of a little girl who lived
in a bubble,” she asked when she had tired
of creating fresh microcosms.

I lifted her on to my knee, and as she
settled herself comfortably she drew my right
arm across her breast and began to nurse it.

“Well, once upon a time —”

24



HER BOOK

25







THE INQUISITION

WOKE at dead of night ;
“The room was still as death ;
All in the dark I saw a sight
Which made me catch my breath.

Although she slumbered near,
The silence hung so deep

I leaned above her crib to hear
If it were death or sleep.

27



WwW. V.

As low —all quick — I leant,
Two large eyes thrust me back ;

Dark eyes — too wise — which gazed intent ;
Blue eyes transformed to black.

Heavens! how those steadfast eyes
Their eerie vigil kept !

Was this some angel in disguise
Who searched us while we slept ;

Who winnow’d every sin,
Who tracked each slip and fall,
One of God’s spies — not Babbykin,
Not Babbykin at all?

Day came with golden air ;
She caught the beams and smiled ;
No masked inquisitor was there,
Only a babbling child !

28



THE FIRST MIRACLE

HE huge weeds bent to let her pass,
And sometimes she crept under ;
She plunged through gulis of flowery grass ;
She filled both hands with plunder.

The buttercups grew tall as she,
Taller the big dog-daisies ;
And so she lost herself, you see,
Deep in the jungle mazes.

29



Wie

A wasp twang’d by; a hornéd snail
Leered from a great-leafed docken ;

She shut her eyes, she raised a wail
Deplorable, heart-broken.

“Mamma!” Two arms, flashed out of space
Miraculously, caught her ;

Fond mouth was pressed to tearful face —
“ What zs it, little daughter? ”’

30



BY THE FIRESIDE

Ro Robin, in the hard
white weather
She marks thee light upon the ice to rest ;
She sees the wintry glass glow with thy
breast
And let thee warm thy feet at thine own
feather. ©

3r



BY THE FIRESIDE

0

N the April sun at baby-house she plays.
Her rooms are traced with stones and
bits of bricks ;
For warmth she lays a hearth with little
sticks,
And one bright crocus makes a merry
blaze !

32



THE RAIDER

ER happy, wondering eyes had ne’er
Till now ranged summer meadows
o’er:
She would keep stopping everywhere
To fill with flowers her pinafore.

But when she saw how, green and wide,
Field followed field, and each was gay
With endless flowers, she laughed — then

sighed,
“No use!’ and threw her spoils away.



BABSIE-—BIRD

N the orchard blithely waking,
Through the blossom, loud and clear,

Pipes the goldfinch, “ Day is breaking ;
Waken, Babsie; May is here!

Bloom is laughing ; lambs are leaping ;
Every new green leaflet sings ;

Five chipp’d eggs will soon be cheeping ;
God be praised for song and wings!”

34



Her Book

Warm and ruddy as an ember,
Lilting sweet from bush to stone,
On the moor in chill November
Flits the stone-chat all alone:
* Snow will soon drift up the heather ;
Days are short, nights cold and long ;
Meanwhile in this glinting weather
God be thanked for wings and song!”

Round from Maytime to November
Babsie lilts upon the wing,
Far too happy to remember
Thanks or praise for anything ;
Save at bedtime, laughing sinner,
When she gaily lisps along,
For the wings and song within her —
“ Thank you, God, for wings and song!”

35



THE ORCHARD OF STARS

MID the orchard grass she ’d stood
and watch’d with childish glee
The big bright burning apples shower’d
like star-falls from the tree ;

So when the autumn meteors fell
she cried, with outspread gown,
“Oh my, papa, look! Isn’t God
just shaking apples down?”

36



THE SWEET PEA

()* what has been born in the night

To bask in this blithe summer morn?
She peers, in a dream of delight,

For something new-made or new-born.

Not spider-webs under the tree,
Not swifts in their cradle of mud,
But — “ Look, father, Sweet Mrs. Pea
Has two little babies in bud!”

37



BROOK-SIDE LOGIC

S the brook caught the blossoms she
cast,
Such a wonder gazed out from her face!
Why, the water was all running past,
Yet the brook never budged from its place.

Oh, the magic of what was so clear!
I explained. And _ enlightened her?
Nay —
“Why but, father, I could n’¢ stay here
If I always was running away!”

38



BUBBLE-BLOWING

UR plot is small, but sunny limes
Shut out all cares and troubles ;
And there my little girl at times
And I sit blowing bubbles.

The screaming swifts race to and fro,
Bees cross the ivied paling,

Draughts lift and set the globes we blow
In freakish currents sailing.

39



Ww. V.

They glide, they dart, they soar, they break.
Oh, joyous little daughter,

What lovely coloured worlds we make,
What crystal flowers of water !

One, green and rosy, slowly drops ;
One soars and shines a minute,

And carries to the lime-tree tops
Our home, reflected in it.

The gable, with cream rose in bloom,
She sees from roof to basement ;

“ Oh, father, there ’s your little room!”
She cries in glad amazement.

To her enchanted with the gleam,
The glamour and the glory,

The bubble home’s a home of dream,
And I must tell its story ;

Tell what we did, and how we played,
Withdrawn from care and trouble —
A father and his merry maid,
Whose house was in a bubble !
40



NEW VERSION OF AN OLD GAME

HE storm had left the rain-butt brim-
ming ;
A dahlia leaned across the brink ;
Its mirrored self, beneath it swimming,
Lit the dark water, gold and pink.

Oh, rain, far fallen from heights of azure —
Pure rain, from heavens so cold and
lone —
Dost thou not feel, and thrill with pleasure
To feel a flower’s heart in thine own?

Enjoy thy beauty, and bestow it,
Fair dahlia, fenced from harm, mishap !
“See, Babs, this flower—and this below
nite
She looked, and screamed in rapture —
Snap !”
4



THE GOLDEN SWING-BOAT

CROSS the low dim fields we caught
Faint music from a distant band —
So sweet i’ the dusk one might have thought
It floated up from elfin-land.

Then, o’er the tree-tops’ hazy blue
We saw the new moon, low i’ the air:
“Look, Dad,” she cried, “a shuggy-shue !
Why, this must be a fairies’ fair!”

42



ANOTHER NEWTON’S APPLE

E tried to show with lamp and ball
How simply day and night were
“made ;”
How earth revolved, and how through all
One half was sunshine, one was shade.

One side, tho’ turned and turned again,
Was always bright. She mused and frowned,

Then flashed — “ It’s just an apple, then,
’at’s always rosy half way round!”

Oh, boundless tree of ranging blue,
Star-fruited through thy heavenly leaves,
Be, if thou canst be, good unto
This apple-loving babe of Eve’s.

43



NATURULA NATURANS

ESIDE the water and the crumbs
She laid her little birds of clay,
For — “ When some other sparrow comes
Perhaps they ‘ll fly away.”

Ah, golden dream, to clothe with wings
A heart of springing joy ; to know

Two lives i’ the happy sum of things
To her their bliss will owe !

Day dawned ; they had not taken flight,
Tho’ playmates called from bush and tree.

She sighed: “ I hardly thought they might.
Well, — God’s more clever’n me! ”

44



WINGS AND HANDS

OD’S angels, dear, have six great wings
Of silver and of gold ;
Two round their heads, two round their
hearts,
Two round their feet they fold.

The angel of a man I know
Has just two hands — so small !

But they ’re more strong than six gold wings
To keep him from a fall.

45



FLOWERS INVISIBLE

Gre *D watched the rose-trees, how they
grew
With green hands full of flowers ;
Such flowers made ¢hezr hands sweet, she
knew,
But tenderness made ours.

So now, o’er fevered brow and eyes
Two small cold palms she closes.
“Thanks, darling!” “Oh, mamma,’ she
cries,
« Are my hands full of roses?”

46



MAKING PANSIES

if HREE faces in a hood.”
Folk called the pansy so
Three hundred years ago.
Of course she understood !

Then, perching on my knee,

She drew her mother’s head

To her own and mine, and said —
“That’s mother, you, and me!”

And so it comes about
We three, for gladness’ sake,
Sometimes a pansy make
Before the gas goes out.

47



HEART-EASE

AST June — how slight a thing to tell !—
One straggling leaf beneath the limes
Against the sunset rose and fell,
Making a rhythm with coloured rhymes.

No other leaf in all the air
Seemed waking; and my little maid
Watched with me, from the garden-chair,
Its rhythmic play of light and shade.

Now glassy gold, now greenish grey,

It dropped, it lifted. That was all.
Strange I should still feel glad to-day

To have seen that one leaf lift and fall.

48



“SI JAVAIS UN ARPENT”

H, had I but a plot of earth, on plain
or vale or hill,
With running water babbling through, in
torrent, spring, or rill,

I’d plant a tree, an olive or an oak or willow
tree,

And build a roof of thatch, or tile, or reed,
for mine and me.



WwW. V.

Upon my tree a nest of moss, or down, or
wool, should hold

A songster— finch or thrush or blackbird

with its bill of gold ;

Beneath my roof a child, with brown. or
blond or chestnut hair,

Should find in hammock, cradle or crib a
nest, and slumber there.

I ask for but a little plot; to measure my
domain

I’d say to Babs, my bairn of bliss, “Go,
alderliefest wean,

“And stand against the rising sun; your
shadow on the grass

Shall trace the limits of my world; beyond I
shall not pass.

“The happiness one can’t attain is dream
and glamour-shine !”

These rhymes are Soulary’s; the thoughts
are Babs’s thoughts and mine.

50



HER FRIEND LITTLEJOHN

or





Her way of “ playing at botany”



HER FRIEND LITTLEJOHN

HE first time Littlejohn saw W. V.—a
year or so ago-—she was sitting on
the edge of a big red flower-pot, into which
she had managed to pack herself. A. bril-
liant Japanese sunshade was tilted over her
shoulder, and close by stood a large green
watering-can. This was her way of “ playing
at botany,” but as the old gardener could
not be prevailed upon to water her, there
was not as much fun in the game as there
ought to have been.

W. V. was accordingly consoling herself
with telling “Mr. Sandy’ — the recalcitrant
gardener —the authentic and _ incredible
story of the little girl who was “just ’scruci-
atingly good.”

Later, on an idyllic afternoon among the
heather, Littlejohn heard all about that excel-

53



Ww. V«.

lent and too precipitate child, who was so
eager to oblige or obey that she rushed off
before she could be told what to do; and
as this was the only story W. V. knew which
had obviously a moral, W. V. made it a
great point to explain that “little girls ought
not to be too good; ¢f— chey — only — did
— what— they — were — told they would be
good enough.”

W. V.’s mother had been taken seriously ill
a few weeks before, and as a house of sickness
is not the best place for a small child, nor a
small child the most soothing presence in a
patient’s room, W. V. had undertaken a mar-
vellous and what seemed an interminable jour-
ney into the West Highlands. Her host and
hostess were delighted with her and her odd
sayings and quaint, fanciful ways; and ghe,
in the plenitude of her good-nature, extended
a cheerful patronage to the grown-up people.
Littlejohn had no children of his own, and it
was a novel delight, full of charming sur-
prises, to have a sturdy, imperious, sunny-
hearted little body of four and a half as his
constant companion. The child was pretty
enough, but it was the alert, excitable little

54



Her Friend Littlejohn

soul of her which peered and laughed out of
her blue eyes that took him captive.

Like most healthy children, W. V. did
not understand what sorrow, sickness, or
death meant. Indeed it is told of her that
she once exclaimed gleefully, “Oh, see,
here’s a funeral! Which is the bride?”
The absence of her mother did not weigh
upon her. Once she awoke at night and
cried for her; and on one or two occasions,
in a sentimental mood, she sighed “ I should
like to see my father! Don’t you think we
could ‘run over’?”” The immediate pres-
ent, its fun and nonsense and grave respon-
sibilities, absorbed all her energies and
‘attention ; and what a divine dispensation it
is that we who never forget can be forgotten
so easily.

I fancy, from what I have heard, that she
must have regarded Littlejohn’s ignorance
of the ways of children as one of her respon-
sibilities. It was really very deplorable to
find a great-statured, ruddy-bearded fellow
of two-and-thirty so absolutely wanting in
tact, so incapable of “ pretending,”’ so desti-
tute of the capacity of rhyming or of telling

55



W. V«.

a story. The way she took him in hand
was kindly yet resolute. It began with her
banging her head against something and
howling. “Don’t cry, dear,” Littlejohn had
entreated, with the crude pathos of an ama-
teur; “come, don’t cry.”

When W. V. had heard enough of this she
looked at him disapprovingly, and said,
«You should n’t say that. You should just
laugh and say, ‘Come, let me kiss that crystal
tear away!’ “Say it!” she added after a
pause. This was Littlejohn’s first lesson in
the airy art of consolation.

Littlejohn as a lyric poet was a melancholy
spectacle.

“Now, you say, ‘Come, let us go,’” W.
V. would command.

“T don’t know it, dear.”

“Tl say half for you —

“Come, let us go where the people sell —”

But Littlejohn had n’t the slightest notion
of what they sold.
“Bananas,” W. V. prompted ; “say it.”
« Bananas.”
“ And what?”
56



Her Friend Littlejohn

“Oranges?” Littlejohn hazarded.

“Pears!” cried W. V. reproachfully ;
“say it!”

“« Pears.”

“ And—” with pauses to give her host
chances of retrieving his honour; “ pine —
ap — pel! —

‘Bananas and pears and pine-appél,’

of course. I don’t think you caz publish a
poem.”

“JT don’t think I can, dear,” Littlejohn
confessed after a roar of laughter.

“ Papa and I published that poem. Pine-
appél made me laugh at first. And after
that you say —

‘ Away to the market! and let us buy
A sparrow to make asparagus pie.’

1»

Say it
So in time Littlejohn found his memory
becoming rapidly stocked with all sorts of
nonsensical rhymes and ridiculous pronun-
ciations.
Inability to rhyme, like inability to reason,
is a gift of nature, and one can overlook it,

57



WwW. V.

but Littlejohn’s sheer imbecility in face of
the demand for a story was a sore trial to
W. V. After an impatient lesson or two,
the way in which he picked up a substitute
for imagination was really exceedingly credi-
table. Having spent a day in the “ Forest”
— W. V. could pack some of her forests in a
nutshell, and feel herself a woodlander of
infinite verdure — Littlejohn learned which
trees were “pappa-trees”’; how to knock
and ask if any one was in; how to make the
dog inside bark if there was no one; how to
get an answer in the affirmative if he asked
whether they could give his little girl a bis-
cuit, or a pear, or a plum; how to discover
the fork in the branches where the gift would
be found, and how to present it to W. V.
with an air of inexhaustible surprise and
delight. Every Forest is full of “ pappa-
trees,” as every verderer knows; the crux of
the situation presents itself when the tenant
of the tree is cross, or the barking dog inti-
mates that he has gone “to the City.”

Now, about a mile from Cloan Den, Little-
john’s house, there was a bit of the real
“old ancient” Caledonian Forest. There

58



Her Friend Littlejohn

was not much timber, it is true, but still
enough ; and occasionally one came across
a shattered shell of oak, which might have
been a pillar of cloudy foliage in the days
when woad was the fashionable dress mate-
rial. I have reason to believe that W. V.
invested all that wild region with a rosy
atmosphere of romance for Littlejohn.
Every blade of grass and fringe of larch was
alive with wood-magic. She trotted about
with him holding his hand, or swinging on
before him with her broad boyish shoulders
thrown well back and an air of unconscious
proprietorship of man and nature.

It was curious to note how her father’s
stories had taken hold of her, and Little-
john, with some surprise at himself and at
the nature of things at large, began to fancy
he saw motive and purpose in some of these
fantastic narratives. The legend of the girl
that was “just ’scruciatingly good”’ had evi-
dently been intended to correct a possible
tendency towards priggishness. The boy
whose abnormal badness expressed itself in
“T don’t care’ could not have been so
irredeemably wicked, or he would never have

59



W. V.

succeeded in locking the bear and tiger up
in the tree and leaving them there to dine
off each other. And all the stories about
little girls who got lost — there were several
of these —were evidently lessons against
fright and incentives to courage and self-
confidence.

W. V. quite believed that if a little girl
got bewildered in the underwood the grass
would whisper “This way, this way!” or
some little furry creature would look up at
her with its sharp beady eyes and tell her to
follow. Even though one were hungry and
thirsty as well as lost, there was nothing to
be afraid of, if there were only oaks in the
Forest. For when once on a time a little
girl—whose name, strangely enough, was
W. V.— got lost and began to cry, did not
the door of an oak-tree open and a little,
little, wee man all dressed in green, with
green boots and a green feather in his cap,
come out and ask her to “step inside,” and
have some fruit and milk? And didn’t he
say, “When you get lost, don’t keep going
this way and going that way and going the
other way, but keep straight on and you are

60



Her Friend Littlejohn

sure to come out at the other side? Only
poor wild things in cages at the Zoo keep
going round and round.”

And that is “truly and really,” W. V.
would add, “because I saw them doing it
at the Zoo.”

Even at the risk of being tedious, I must
finish the story, for it was one that greatly
delighted Littlejohn and haunted him in a
pleasant fashion. Well, when this little girl who
was lost had eaten the fruit and drunk the milk,
she asked the wee green oak-man to go with
her a little way, as it was growing dusk. And
he said he would. Then he whistled, and
close to, and then farther away, and still
farther and farther, other little oak-men whis-
tled in answer, till all the Forest was full of
the sound of whistling. And the oak-man
shouted, “ Will you help this little girl out? ”
and you could hear “ Yes, yes, yes, yes,” far
away right and left, to the very end of the
Forest. And the oak-man walked a few
yards with her, and pointed; and she saw
another oak and another oak-man; and so
she went on from one to another right
through the Forest; and she said, “ Thank

61



Ww. V«.

you, Mr. Oak-man,” to each of them, and
bent down and gave each of them a kiss,
and they all laughed because they were
pleased, and when she got out she could
still hear them laughing quietly together.

Another story that pleased Littlejohn
hugely, and he liked W. V. to tell it as he
lay in a hollow among the heather with his
bonnet pulled down to the tip of his nose,
was about the lost little girl who walked
among the high grass —it was quite up to
her eyes—till she was “tired to death.”
So she lay down, and just as she was begin-
ning to doze off she heard a very soft voice
humming her to’ sleep, and she felt warm
soft arms snuggling her close to a warm
breast. And as she was wondering who it
could be that was so kind to her, the soft
voice whispered, “It is only mother, dearie ;
sleep-a-sleep, dearie ; only mother cuddling
her little girl.” And when she woke there
was no one there, and she had been lying
in quite a little grassy nest in the hollow of
the ground.

Littlejohn himself could hardly credit the
change which this voluble, piquant, imperious

62



Her Friend Littlejohn

young person had made not only in the
ways of the house, but in his very being
and in the material landscape itself. One
of the oddest and most incongruous things
he ever did in his life was to measure W. V.
against a tree and inscribe her initials (her
father always called her by her initials and
she liked that form of her name best), and
his own, and the date, above the score which
marked her height.

The late summer and the early autumn
passed delightfully in this fashion. There
was some talk at intervals of W. V. being
packed, labelled, and despatched “with
care’? to her own woods and oak-men in
the most pleasant suburb of the great
metropolis, but it never came to anything.
Her father was persuaded to spare her just
a little longer. The patter of the little feet,
the chatter of the voluble, cheery voice, had
grown well-nigh indispensable to Littlejohn
and his wife, for though I have confined
myself to Littlejohn’s side of the story, I
would not have it supposed that W. V.’s
charm did not radiate into other lives.

So the cold rain and the drifted leaf, the

63



WANS

. first frost and the first snow came; and in
their train come Christmas and the Christ-
mas-tree and the joyful vision of Santa Claus.

Now to make a long story short, a polite
note had arrived at Cloan Den asking for the
pleasure of Miss W. V.’s company at Bar-
geddie Mains — about a mile and a half be-
yond the “ old ancient ”’ Caledonian Forest —
where a Christmas-tree was to be despoiled of
its fairy fruitage. The Bargeddie boys would
drive over for Miss W. V. in the afternoon,
and “ Uncle Big-John” would perhaps come
for the young lady in the evening, unless in-
deed he would change his mind and allow
her to stay all night.

Uncle Big-John, of course, did not change
his mind ; and about nine o’clock he reached
the Mains. It was a sharp moonlight night,
and the wide snowy strath sweeping away up
to the vast snow-muffled Bens looked like a
silvery expanse of fairyland. So far as I can
gather it must have been well on the early
side of ten when Littlejohn and W. V. (re-
joicing in the spoils of the Christmas-tree)
bade the Bargeddie people good-night and
started homeward — the child warmly muf-

64



Her Friend Littlejohn

fled, and chattering and laughing hilariously
as she trotted along with her hand in his.

It has often since been a subject of wonder
that Littlejohn did not notice the change of
the weather, or that, having noticed it, he
did not return for shelter to the Mains. But
we are all too easily wise after the event, and
it is to be remembered that the distance from
home was little over three miles, and that
Littlejohn was a perfect giant of a man.

They could have hardly been more than
half a mile from Bargeddie when the snow
storm began. The sparse big flakes thick-
ened, the wind rose bitterly cold, and then,
in a fierce smother of darkness, the moonlight
was blotted out. For what follows the story
depends principally on the recollections of
W. V., and in a great measure on one’s
knowledge of Littlejohn’s nature.

The biting cold and the violence of the wind
soon exhausted the small traveller. Little-
john took her in his arms, and wrapped her
in his plaid. For some time they kept to
the highroad, but the bitter weather suggested
the advisability of taking a crow-line across
the Forest.

5 65



Ww. V.~.

“You’re a jolly heavy lumpumpibus, In-
fanta,”’ Littlejohn said with a laugh; “I
think we had better try a short cut for once
through the old oaks.”

When they got into some slight cover
among the younger trees, Littlejohn paused
to recover his breath. It was still blowing
and snowing heavily.

“Now, W. V., I think it would be as well
if you knocked up some of your little green
oak-men, for the Lord be good to me if I
know where we are.”

“ You must knock,” said W. V., “but I
don’t think you will get any bananas.”

W. V. says that Littlejohn did knock and
that the bark of the dog showed that the oak-
man was not at home!

“T rather thought he would not be, W.
V.,” said Littlejohn; “they never are at
home except only to the little people. We
big ones have to take care of ourselves.”

“The oak-man said, ‘Keep straight on,
and you’re sure to come out at the other
side,’ W. V. reminded him.

“The oak-man spoke words of wisdom,
Infanta,” said Littlejohn. ‘Come along, W.

66



Her Friend Littlejohn

Vv.” And he lifted the child again in his
arms. “Are you cold, my dearie-girl?”’

“No, only my face; but I am so sleepy.”

“And so heavy, W. V. I didn’t think a
little girl cowld be so heavy. Come along,
and let us try keeping straight on. The
other side must be somewhere.”

How long he trudged on with the child in
his arms and the bewildering snow beating
and clotting on them both will never be
known. W.V., with a spread of his plaid
over her face, fell into a fitful slumber, from
which she was awakened by a fall and a
scramble.

“You poor helpless bairn,” he groaned,
“have I hurt you?”

W. V. was not hurt; the snow-wreath had
been too deep for that.

“Well, you see, W. V., we came a lament-
able cropper that time,” said Littlejohn. “I
think we must rest a little, for I’m fagged
out. You see, W. V., there is no grass to
whisper, ‘This way, this way ;’ and there are
no furry things to say, ‘Follow me ;’ and the
oak-men are all asleep; and—and, God
forgive me, I don’t know what to do!”

67



Ww. V.

“Are you crying, Uncle Big-John?”
asked W.V.; for “his voice sounded just
like as if he was crying,” she explained
afterwards.

“Crying! no, my dear; there’s no need
to kiss the crystal tear away! But, you see,
I’m tired, and it’s jolly cold and dark ; and,
as Mother Earth is good to little children
——” He paused to see how he should
be best able to make herunderstand. “ You
remember how that little girl that was lost
went to sleep in a hollow of the grass and
heard the Mother talking to her? Well,
you must just lie snug like that, you
see.”

“ But I’m not lost.”

“ Of course, you’re not lost. Only you
must lie snug and sleep till it stops snowing,
and I'll sit beside you.”

Littlejohn took off his plaid and his thick
tweed jacket. He wrapped the child in the
latter, and half covered her with snow.
With the plaid, propped up with his stick, he
made a sort of tent to shelter her from the
driving flakes. He then lay down beside her
till she fell asleep.

68



Her Friend Littlejohn

“It’s only mother, dearie; mother cud-
dling her little girl; sleep-a-sleep.”

Then he must have arisen shuddering in
his shirt-sleeves, and have lashed his arms
again and again about his body for warmth.

In the hollow in which they were found,
the snow-wreath, with the exception of a
narrow passage, a few feet in width where
they had blundered in, was impassably deep
on all sides. All round and round the
hollow the snow was very much trampled.

Worn out with fatigue and exposure, the
strong man had at last lain down beside the
child. His hand was under his head.

In that desperate circular race against cold
and death he must have been struck by his
own resemblance to the wild creatures pad-
ding round and round in their cages in the
Zoo, and what irony he must have felt in
the counsel of the wee green oak-man.
Well, he had followed the advice, had he
not? And, when he awoke, would he not
find that he had come out at the other side?

Hours afterwards, when at last Littlejohn
slowly drifted back to consciousness, he lay
69



WwW. V.«.

staring for a moment or two witha dazed be-
wildered brain. ‘Then into his eyes there
flashed a look of horror, and he struggled to
pull himself together. “My God, my God,
where is the Infant?” he groaned.

W. V. was hurried into the room, oblivi-
ously radiant. With a huge sigh Littlejohn
sank back smiling, and held out his hand to
her. Whereupon W. V., moving it gently
aside, went up close to him and spoke, half
in inquiry half in remonstrance, “You ’re zo?
going to be died, are you?”

70



HER BED-TIME

71



an

: :





HER BED-TIME

N these winter evenings, thanks to the
Great Northern, and to Hesperus who
brings all things home, I reach my door-
step about half-an-hour before W. V.’s bed-
time. A sturdy, rosy, flaxen-haired little
body opens to my well-known knock, takes
a kiss on the tip of her nose, seizes my um-
brella, and makes a great show of assisting
me with my heavy overcoat. She leads me
into the dining-room, gets my slippers, runs
my bootlaces into Gordian knots in her im-
petuous zeal, and announces that she has
“set”? the tea. At table she slips furtively
on to my knee, and we are both happy till a
severe voice, ‘“‘ Now, father!” reminds us of
the reign of law in general, and of that law
in particular which enacts that it is shocking
in little girls to want everything they see,

73



W. V.«.

and most reprehensible in elderly people
(I elderly!) to encourage them.

We are glad to escape to the armchair,
where, after I have lit my pipe and W. V.
has blown the elf of flame back to fairyland,
we conspire —not overtly indeed, but each
in his deep mind — how we shall baffle do-
mestic tyranny and evade, if but for a few
brief minutes of recorded time, the cubicular
moment and the inevitable hand of the bath-
maiden.

The critical instant occurs about half-way
through my first pipe, and W. V.’s devices
for respite or escape are at once innumerable
and transparently ingenious. I admit my
connivance without a blush, though I may
perchance weakly observe: ‘‘One sees so
little of her, mother ;’’ for how delightful it
is when she sings or recites—and no one
would be so rude as to interrupt a song or
recitation — to watch the little hands waving
in “the air so blue,” the little fingers flick-
ering above her head in imitation of the
sparks at the forge, the little arms nursing
an imaginary weeping dolly, the blue eyes lit
up with excitement as they gaze abroad from

74



Her Bed-time

the cherry-tree into the “foreign lands”
beyond the garden wall.

She has much to tell me about the day’s
doings. Yes, she Aas been clay-modelling.
I have seen some of her marvellous baskets
of fruit and birds’ nests and ivy leaves;
but to-day she has been doing what dear
old Mother Nature did in one of her happy
moods some millenniums ago — making a
sea with an island in it; and around the sea
mountains, one a volcano with a crater blaz-
ing with red crayon; and a river with a
bridge across it; quite a boldly conceived
and hospitable fragment of a new planet.
Of course Miss Jessie helped her, but she
would soon be able, all by herself, to create
a new world in which there should be ever-
blossoming spring and a golden age, and
fairies to make the impossible common-
place. W. V. does not put it in that way,
but those, I fancy, would be the character-
istics of a universe of her happy and inno-
cent contriving.

In her early art days W. V. was distinctly
Darwinian. Which was the cow, and which
the house, and which the lady, was always a

75



W. V«.

nice question. One could differentiate with
the aid of a few strokes of natural selection,
but essentially they were all of the same pro-
toplasm. Her explanations of her pictures
afforded curious instances of the easy magic
with which a breath of her little soul made
all manner of dry bones live. I reproached
her once with wasting paper which she had
covered with a whirling scribble. “Why,
father,’”’ she exclaimed with surprise, “ that ’s
the north wind!” Her latest masterpiece
is a drawing of a stone idol; but it is only
exhibited on condition that, when you see it,
you must “shake with fright.”

At a Kindergarten one learns, of course,
many things besides clay-modelling, draw-
ing, and painting: poetry, for instance, and
singing, and natural history; drill and ball-
playing and dancing. And am I not curious
— this with a glance at the clock which is on
the stroke of seven — to hear the new verse
of her last French song? Shall she recite
“ Purr, purr!” or “The Swing’? Or would
it not be an agreeable change to have her
sing “Up into the Cherry Tree,” or “The
Busy Blacksmith ” ?

46



Her Bed-time

Any or all of these would be indeed de-
lectable, but parting is the same sweet sorrow
at the last as at the first. However, we shall
have one song. And after that a recitation
by King Alfred! The king is the most
diminutive of china dolls dressed in green
velvet. She steadies him on the table by
one leg, and crouches down out of sight
while he goes through his performance.
The Fauntleroy hair and violet eyes are the
eyes and hair of King Alfred, but the voice
is the voice of W. V.

When she has recited and sung I draw her
between my knees and begin: “ There was
once a very naughty little girl, and her name
was W. V.”

“No, father, a good little girl.”

“Well, there was a good little girl, and
her name was Gladys.”

“ No, father, a good little girl called W. V.”

“ Well, a good little girl called W. V.; and
she was ‘quickly obedient’; and when her
father said she was to go to bed, she said:
‘Yes, father,’ and she just fzew, and gave no
trouble.”

« And did her father come up and kiss her?”

77



Ww. V.

« Why, of course, he did.”

A few minutes later she is kneeling on the
bed with her head nestled in my breast,
repeating her evening prayer : —

“Dear Father, whom I cannot see,
Smile down from heaven on little me.

Let angels through the darkness spread
Their holy wings about my bed.

And keep me safe, because I am
The heavenly Shepherd’s little lamb.

Dear God our Father, watch and keep
Father and mother while they sleep ;

“and bless Dennis, and Ronnie, and Uncle
John, and Auntie Bonnie, and Phyllis (did
Phyllis used to squint when she was a baby?
Poor Phyllis!) ; and Madame, and Lucille
(she is only a tiny little child; a quarter
past three years or something like that) ;
and Ivo and Wilfrid (he has bronchitis
very badly; he can’t come out this winter ;
aren’t you sorry for him? Really a dear
little boy).”
«‘ Any one else?”
78



Her Bed-time

“ Auntie Edie and Grandma. (#e will
have plenty to do, won’t He?) ”
«And ‘ Teach me’” — I suggest.

“Teach me to do what I am told,
And help me to be good as gold.”

And a whisper comes from the pillow as I
tuck in the eider-down, —

“ Now He will be wondering whether I
am going to be a good girl.”

79







VARIOUS VERSES.







EAST OF EDEN

AR down upon the plain the large round
moon
Sank red in jungle mist; but on the
heights
The coid clear darkness burned with restless
stars :
And, restless as the stars, the grim old King
Paced with fierce choleric strides the mon-
strous ridge
Of boulders piled to make the city wall.
Muttering his wrath within his cloudy beard,
He moved, and paused, and turned. The
starlight caught
The huge bent gold that ringed his giant
head,

83



W. V~.

Gleamed on the jewel-fringed vast lion-
fells

That clothed his stature, ran in dusky play

Along the ponderous bronze that armed his
spear.

He fiercely scanned the East for signs of
dawn ;

Then shook his clenchéd hand above his
head,

And blazed with savage eyes and brow thrown
back

To front the awful Presence he addressed :

“Slay and make end; or take some mortal
form

That I may strive with Thee! Art Thou so
strong

And yet must smite me out of Thine Un-
seen?

Long centuries have passed since Thou didst
place

Thy mark upon me, lest at any time

Men finding me should slay me. I have
grown

84



East of Eden

Feeble and hoary with the toil of years —

An aged palsy — now, alas, no more

That erst colossal adamant whereon

Thine hand engraved its vengeance. Be
Thou just,

And answer when I charge Thee. Have I
blenched

Before Thy fury ; have I bade Thee spare ;

Hath Thy long torture wrung one sob of
pain,

One cry of supplication from my mouth?

But Thou hast made Thyself unseen; hast
lain

In ambush to afflict me. Day and night

Thou hast been watchful. Thy vindictive

eyes

Have known no’ slumber. Make Thyself a
man

That I may seize Thee in my grips, and
strive

But once on equal terms with Thee — but
once.

Or send Thine angel with his sword of
fire —

But no; not him! Come Thou, come Thou
Thyself ;

85



WwW. V.

Come forth from Thine Invisible, and face
In mortal guise the mortal Thou has
plagued!”

The race of giants, sunk in heavy sleep
Within the cirque of those cyclopean walls,
Heard as it were far thunder in their dreams ;
But answer came there none from cloud or
star.

Then cried the aged King;

“ A curse consume
Thy blind night fevered with the glare of stars,
Wild voices, and the agony of dreams !
Would it were day!”

At last the gleam of dawn
Swept in a long grey shudder from the East,
Then reddened o’er the misty jungle tracts.
The guards about the massive city gates
Fell back with hurried whispers: “’Tis the
King!”
And forth, with great white beard and gold-
girt brows,
Huge spear, and jewelled fells, the giant strode
To slake his rage among the beasts of prey.
86



East of Eden

The fierce white splendour of a tropic noon;

A sweltering waste of jungle, breathing flame ;

The sky one burning sapphire !

By a spring

Within the shadow of a bluff of rock

The hoary giant rested. At his feet

The cool green mosses edged the crystal
pool,

And flowers of blue and gold and rose-red
lulled :

The weary eye with colour. As he sat

There rose a clamour from the sea of
canes ;

He heard a crash of boughs, a rush of feet ;

And, lo! there bounded from the tangled
growth

A panting tiger mad with pain and rage.

The beast sprang roaring, but the giant
towered

And pashed with one fell buffet bone and
brain ;

Then staggered with a groan, for, keen and
swift,

At that same instant from the jungle flew

A shaft which to the feather pierced his
frame.

87



Ww. V.

Shrill cries of horror maddened round the
bluff:

* Oh, Elohim, ’t is Cain the King, the King!”

And weeping, tearing hair, and wringing
hands,

About him raved his lawless giant brood.

But Cain spoke slowly with a ghastly smile:
“ Peace, and give heed, for now I am but dead.
~Let no man be to blame for this my death;
Yea, swear a solemn oath that none shall
harm
A hair of him who gives me my release.
Come hither, boy!”
And, weeping, Lamech went
And stood before the face of Cain ; and Cain
Who pressed a hand against his rushing
wound
Reddened his grandson’s brow and kissed his
cheek:
_ “The blood of Cain alight on him who lifts
A hand against thy life. My spear, boys! So.
Let no foot follow. Cain must die alone.
Let no man seek me till ye see in heaven
A sign, and know that Cain is dead.”
88



East of Eden

He smiled,
And from the hollow of his hand let fall
A crimson rain upon the crystal spring,
Which caught the blood in glassy ripple and
whirl,
And reddened moss and boulder.
Swift of stride,
With gold-girt brow thrown back to front the
Unseen,
The hoary giant through the jungle waste
Plunged, muttering in his beard; and on-
ward pressed
Through the deep tangle of the trackless

growth

To reach some lair, where hidden and un-
heard

His savage soul in its last strife might
cope

With God — perchance one moment visible.

A sweltering tract of jungle, breathing flame ;
A fiery silence; all the depth of heaven

One blinding sapphire !

: Watching by the cliff,
The giant brood stood waiting for the sign,

89



W. V~.

Behold ! a speck, high in the blazing blue,

Hung black — asingle speck above the waste ;

Hung poised an hour ; then dropped through
leagues of air,

Plumb as a stone ; and as it dropped they saw

Through leagues of high blue air, to north
and south,

To east and west, black specks that sprang
from space,

And then long sinuous lines of distant spots

Which flew converging — growing, as they
flew, .

To slanting streams and palpitating swarms;

Which flew converging out of all the heavens,

And blackened, as they flew, the sapphire
blaze,

And jarred the fiery hush with winnowing
wings ;

Which flew converging on a single point

Deep in the jungle waste, and, as they
swooped,

Paused in the last long slide with dangling
claws,

Then dropped like stone.

Thus knew the giant brood
That Cain was dead.

go



Full Text

The Baldwin Library

KiB


& PBT ated V bee.
W. V. HER BOOK

And Various Verses
OTHER BOOKS BY SAME AUTHOR

‘THE INVISIBLE PLAYMATE”
‘CA LOST EPIC AND OTHER. POEMS””


“ Thank you, Mr. Oakman”
W. V. HER BOOK

And Various Verses

BY

WILLIAM CANTON

With T-wo Illustrations by C. E. Brock



NEW YORK
STONE & KIMBALL

M DCCC XCVI1
COPYRIGHT, 1896, BY
STONE AND KIMBALL
Contents

W. V., HER BirTHDAY .

Her Boox
The Inquisition .
The First Miracle
By the Fireside. I.
By the Fireside. II.
The Raider
Babsie-Bird ‘
The Orchard of Stars .
The Sweet Pea .
Brook-side Logic
Bubble-Blowing .
New Version of an Old cae
The Golden: Swing-Boat
Another Newton’s Apple .
Naturula Naturans .
Wings and Hands
Flowers Invisible -
Making Pansies .
Heart-ease :
‘¢Si f avais un arpent””

Her Frienp LITr.tejoHn

Her BeED-TIME .
vil

PAGE
Contents

Various VERSES Ce
Bastvote Eden: ays mrcite eens tween .3)
GoodwinvSands |) suis) Gea ee 2
Dra tell ora typeeeeve net te rateegat eet alice) 7

VIGNETTES
adie Wena, UG 6° 6 oo a 0 ROR
The Wanderer. ID. . . . . . . 4204
pishesScarecrowiersj)- 9.) sy tions ft ie OO

The Haunted Bridge . . . «© . ~ 108
ania Qiome aig 9G 6 6 Ja io 8 0 RHO
Seas Picturess lees alee sh ony ee menTcl2,
Sea=Picturesss lly ei ien et epee one eA
II@OnNENE G6 9g 16 10 5-6, a. 9-0 BHO
Green Pastures Riirea cach ee iierak romance TLIO
The Little Dipper. . . . « «. « 4420
retire sELill siemens cue rtes oe ope eran Tso 7
Nature’s Magic ee ae 122
April Voices . . . + + 6 «© « 123
Green Sky . - 5 + 6 «© + © + 128

Susp Umsra Crucis
The Shepherd Beautiful . . . . . (131
AMG IMIG 5 660 6 6 6 oo HD
PAG Garoleaiis =e. apes etek elt a3 O
When Snow Lies Deen 5 6 6 oo BGS
sc Trees of ees Sauer er O
The Comrades. . Soi eee eerl 42)
«¢ Crying, Abba, F ther”? See aie RAS
This Grace Vouchsafe . . . . + I50

viii
HER BIRTHDAY

HER BIRTHDAY

7" are still on the rosy side of the
apple; but this is the last Saturday
in September, and we cannot expect many
more golden days between this and the cry
of the cuckoo. But what a summer we have
had, thanks to one of W. V.’s ingenious sug-
gestions! She came to us in April, when
the world is still a trifle bare and the wind
somewhat too bleak for any one to get com-
fortably lost in the Forest or cast up on a
coral reef; so we have made her birthday
a movable feast, and whenever a fine free
Saturday comes round we devote it to
thankfulness that she has been born, and
to the joy of our both being alive together.
W. V. sleeps in an eastern room, and
accordingly the sun rises on that side of the
house. Under the eaves and just above her

3
Ww. V.

window the martins have a nest plastered
against the wall, and their chattering awakens
her in the first freshness of the new morning.
She watches the black shadows of the birds
fluttering on the sunny blind, as, first one
and then another, they race up to the nest,
and vibrate in the air a moment, before dart-
ing into it. When her interest has begun to
flag, she steals in to me in her nightdress,
and tugs gently at my beard till I waken and
sit up. Unhappily her mother wakens too.
“What, more birthdays!’ she exclaims in a
tone of stern disapproval; whereat W. V.
and I laugh, for evasion of domestic law is
the sweet marjoram of our salad. But it zs
possible to coax even a Draconian parent into
assent, and oh!

Flower of the may,
If mamsie will not say her nay,
W. won’t care what any one may say!

We first make a tour of the garden, and it
is delightful to observe W. V. prying about
with happy, eager eyes, to detect whether
nature has been making any new thing during
the dim, starry hours when people are too

4
Her Birthday

sound asleep to notice; delightful to hear
her little screams of ecstasy when she has
discovered something she has not seen be-
fore. It is singular how keenly she notes
every fresh object, and in what quaint and
pretty terms of phrase she expresses her
glee and wonderment. “ Oh, father, have n’t
the bushes got their hands quite full of
flowers?”? “Aren’t the buds the trees’ little
girls?”

This morning the sun was blissfully warm,
and the air seemed alive with the sparkle of
the dew, which lay thick on every blade and
leaf. As we went round the gravel walks
we perceived how completely.all the earlier
flowers had vanished ; even the lovely sweet
peas were almost over. We have still, how-
ever, the single dahlias, and marigolds, and
-hasturtiums, on whose level leaves the dew
stood shining like globules of quicksilver ;
and the tall Michaelmas daisies make quite a
white-topped thicket along the paling, while
the rowan-berries are burning in big red
bunches over the western hedge.

In the corner near the limes we came
upon a marvellous spectacle —a huge old

5
W. V.«.

spider hanging out in his web in the sun,
like a grim old fisherman floating in the
midst of his nets at sea. A hand’s breadth
off, young bees and new-born flies were busy
with the low perennial sunflowers ; he watch-
ing them motionlessly, with his gruesome
shadow silhouetted on a leaf hard by. In
his immediate neighbourhood the fine threads
of his web were invisible, but a little distance
away one could distinguish their concentric
curves, grey on green. Every now and then
we heard the snapping of a stalk overhead,
and a leaf pattered down from the limes.
Every now and then, too, slight suzges of
breeze run shivering through the branches.
Nothing distracted the intense vigilance of
the crafty fisherman. Scores of glimmering
insects grazed the deadly snare, but none
touched it. It must have been tantalising,
but the creature’s sullen patience was invinci-
ble. W. V. at last dropped a piece of leaf-
stalk on his web, out of curiosity. In a
twinkling he was at the spot, and the frag-
ment was dislodged with a single jerk.

This is one of the things in which she
delights — the quiet observation of the ways

6
Her Birthday

of creatures. Nothing would please her
better, could she but dwarf herself into an
‘“‘aglet-baby,” than to climb into those filmy
meshes and have a chat in the sunshine with
the wily ogre. She has no mistrust, she feels
no repulsion from anything that has life.
There is a warm place in her heart for the
cool, dry toad, and she loves the horned
snail, if not for his own sake, at least for his
* darling little house ” and the silver track he
leaves on the gravel.

Of course she wanted a story about a
spider. I might have anticipated as much.
Well, there was King Robert the Bruce, who
was saved by aspider from his enemies when
they were seeking his life.

“And if they had found him, would
they have sworded off his head? Really,
father? Like Oliver Crumball did Charles
King’s?”

Her grammar was defective, but her
surmises were beyond dispute; they would.
Then there was the story of Sir Samuel
Brown, who took his idea of a suspension
bridge from a web which hung — but W. V.
wanted something much more engrossing.

7
Ww. V.~.

“Wasn’t there never no awful big spider
that made webs in the Forest?”

“And caught lions and bears?”

She nodded approvingly. Oh, yes, there
was — once upon a time.

“ And was there a little girl there?”

There must have been for the story to be
worth telling ; but the breakfast bell broke in
on the opening chapter of that little girl’s
incredible adventures.

After breakfast we followed the old birth-
day custom, and “ plunged” into the depths
of the Forest. Some persons, I have heard,
call our Forest the “East Woods,” and
report that though they are pleasant enough
in summer, they are rather meagre and
limited in area. Now, it is obvious that it
would be impossible to “ plunge” into any-
‘thing less than a Forest. Certainly, when
W. V. is with me I am conscious of the
Forest —the haunted, enchanted, aboriginal
Forest; and I see with something of her
illumined vision, the vision of W. V., who
can double for herself the comfort of a fire on
a chilly day by running into the next room

8
Her Birthday

and returning with the tidings, “It’s very
cold in the woods!”

If you are courageous enough to leave the
paths and hazard yourself among the under-
wood and the litter of bygone autumns,
twenty paces will take you to the small
Gothic doors of the Oak-men ; twenty more
to the cavern of the Great Bruin, and the
pollard tree on the top of which the foxes
live ; while yet another twenty, and you are
at the burrows of the kindliest of all insects,
the leaf-cutter bees. Once —in parenthesis
—when a little maid was weeping because
she had lost her way at dusk in the Forest
mazes, it was a leaf-cutter bee that tunnelled
a straight line through the trees, so that the
nearest road lamp, miles away, twinkled right
into the Forest, and she was able to guide her-
self home. Indeed, it will only take ten min-
utes if you do not dawdle, to get to the dread-
ful webs of the Iron Spider, and when you
do reach that spot, the wisest thing you can
do is to follow the example of the tiny
flame-elf when — match is blown out — clap
on your cap of darkness and- scuttle back to
fairyland.
W. V«.

What magical memories have we two of
the green huddle and the dreamy lawns of
that ancient and illimitable Forest! We
know the bosky dingles where we shall find
pappa trees, on whose lower branches a little
girl may discover something to eat when she
is good enough to deserve it. We know
where certain green-clad foresters keep store
of fruits which are supposed, by those who
know no better, to grow only in orchards by
tropical seas. Of course every one is aware
that in the heart of the Forest there is a
granite fountain; but only we two have
learned the secret that its water is the
Water of Heart’s-ease, and that if we con-
tinue to drink it we shall never grow really
old. We have still a great deal of the
Forest to explore; we have never reached
the glade where the dog-daisies have to
be chained because they grow so exceed-
ingly wild; nor have we found the blue
thicket — it is blue because it is so distant
—from which some of the stars come up
into the dusk when it grows late; but
when W. V. has got her galloping-horse-
bicycle we shall start with the first sun-

10
Her Birthday

shine some morning, and give the whole day
to the quest.

We lowly folk dine before most people
think of lunching, and so dinner was ready
when we arrived home. Now, as decorum
at table is one of the cardinal virtues W. V.
dines by proxy. It is her charming young
friend Gladys who gives us the pleasure of
her company. It is strange how many things
this bewildering daughter of mine can do as
Gladys, which she cannot possibly accom-
plish as W. V. W. V. is unruly, a chatter-
box, careless, or at least forgetiul, of the
elegances of the social board; whereas
Gladys is a model of manners, an angel in a
bib. W. V. cannot eat crusts, and rebels
against porridge at breakfast ; Gladys idolises
crusts, and as for porridge— “I am sur-
prised your little girl does not like porridge.
It is so good for her.”

After dinner, as I lay smoking in the gar-
den lounge to-day, I fell a-thinking of W. V.
and Gladys, and the numerous other little
maids in whom this tricksy spirite has been

II
Ww. V.

masquerading since she came into the world
five years ago. She began the small comedy
before she had well learned to balance her-
self on her feet. As she sat in the middle of
the carpet we would play at looking for the
baby— where has the baby gone? have you
seen the baby?—and, oddly enough, she
would take a part and pretend to wonder, or
perhaps actually did wonder, what had be-
come of herself, till at last we would discover
her on the floor —to her own astonishment
and irrepressible delight.

Then, as she grew older, it was amusing
to observe how she would drive away the
naughty self, turn it literally out of doors,
and return as the “Smiling Winifred.” I
presume she grew weary, as human nature is
apt to grow, of a face whichis wreathed in
amaranthine smiles ;.so the Smiling Winifred
vanished, and we were visited by various
‘sweet children with lovely names, of whom
Gladys is the latest and the most indefatiga-
ble. I cannot help laughing when I recall
my three-year-old rebel listening for a few
moments to a scolding, and when she con-
sidered that the ends of justice had been

12
Her Birthday

1?

served, exclaiming, “I put my eyes down
—which meant that so far as she was
concerned the episode was now definitively
closed.

My day-dream was broken by W. V. flying
up to me with fern fronds fastened to her
shoulders for wings. She fluttered round me,
then flopped into my lap, and put her arms
about my neck. “If I was a real swan,
father, I would cuddle your head with my
wings.”

“Ah, well, you are a real duck, Diddles,
and that will do quite as well.”

She was thinking of that tender Irish
legend of the Children of Lir, changed into
swans by their step-mother and doomed to
suffer heat and cold, tempest and hunger,
homelessness and sorrow, for nine hundred
years, till the sound of the first Christian
bell changed them again —to frail, aged
human creatures. It was always the sister,
she knows, who solaced and strengthened
the brothers beside the terrible sea of Moyle,
sheltering them under her wings and warm-
ing them against her bosom. In sucha case

13
Ww. V.

as this an only child is at a disadvantage.
Even M’rao, her furry playmate, might have
served as a bewitched brother, but after
many months of somnolent forbearance M’rao
ventured into the great world beyond our
limes, and returned no more.

Flower of the quince,
Puss once kissed Babs, and ever since
She thinks he mzzs¢ be an enchanted prince.

In a moment she was off again, an angel,
flying about the garden and in and out of the
house in the performance of helpful offices
for some one; or, perchance, a fairy, for her
heaven is a vague and strangely-peopled
region. Long ago she told me that the
moon was “put up” by a black man—a
saying which puzzled me until I came to
understand that this negro divinity could
only have been the “divine Dark” of the
old Greek poet. Of course she says her
brief, simple prayers ; but how can one con-
vey to a child’s mind any but the most
provisional and elemental conceptions of the
Invisible? Once I was telling her the story
of a wicked king, who put his trust in a fort

14
Her Birthday

of stone on a mountain peak, and scoffed at.
a prophet God had sent to warn him. “He
was n’t very wise,” said W. V., “ for God and
Jesus and the angels and the fairies are
cleverer’n we are; they have wings.” The
* cleverness ’’ of God has deeply impressed
her. He can make rain and see through
walls. She noticed some stone crosses in a
sculptor’s yard some time ago, and remarked :
“ Jesus was put on one of those ;” then, after
some reflection: “Who was it put Jesus on
the cross? Was it the church people,
father??? Well, when one comes to think
of it, it was precisely the church people —
“not these church people, dear, but the
church people of hundreds of years ago,
when Jesus was alive.” She had seen the
world’s tragedy in the stained glass windows
and had drawn her own conclusion — the
people who crucified would be the most
likely to makea picture of the crucifixion ;
Christ’s friends would want to forget it and
never to speak of it.

In the main she does not much concern
herself with theology or the unseen. She
lives in the senses. Once, indeed, she

15
Ww. V.

began to communicate some interesting re-
miniscences of what had happened “ before
she came here,” to this planet; but some-
thing interrupted her, and she has not
attempted any further revelation. There is
nothing more puzzling in the world to her,
I fancy, than an echo. She has forgotten
that her own face in the mirror was quite as
bewildering. A high wind at night is not
a pleasant fellow to have shaking your window
and muttering down your chimney; but an
intrepid father with a yard of brown oak is
more than a match for Azm. Thunder and
lightning she regards as “ great friends ; they
always come together.” She is more per-
ceptive of their companionship than of their
air of menace towards mankind. Darkness,
unless it be on the staircase, does not trouble
her: when we have said good-night out goes
the gas. But there seems to be some quality
or influence in the darkness which makes
her affectionate and considerate. Once and
again when she has slept with me and
wakened in the dead of night she has been
most apologetic and self-abasing. She is so
sorry to disturb me, she knows she is a
16
Her Birthday

bother, but wold I give her a biscuit or a
drink of water?

She has all along been a curious combina-
tion of tenderness and savagery. In a
sudden fit of motherhood she will bring me
her dolly to kiss, and ten minutes later I
shall see it lying undressed and abandoned
in a corner of the room. She is a Spartan
parent, and slight is the chance of her chil-
dren being spoiled either by sparing the rod
or lack of stern monition. It is not so long
ago that we heard a curious sound of distress
in the dining-room, and on her mother
hurrying downstairs to see what was amiss,
there was W. V. chastising her recalcitrant
babe —and doing the weeping herself. This
appeared to be a good opportunity for point-
ing a moral. It was clear now that she
knew what it was to be naughty and dis-
obedient, and if she punished these faults
so severely in her own children she must
expect me to deal with her manifold and
grievous offences in the same way. She
looked very much sobered and concerned,
but a few moments later she brought me a
stout oak walking-stick: “ Would that do,

2 14
W. V.

father?’”? She shows deep commiseration
for the poor and old; grey hairs and penury
are sad bed-fellows; but for the poor who
are not old I fear she feels little sympathy.
Perhaps we, or the conditions of life, are to
blame for this limitation of feeling, for when
we spoke to her of certain poor little girls
with no mothers, she rejoined: “Why don’t
you take them, then?” Our compassion
which stopped short of so simple a remedy
must have ‘seemed suspiciously like a
pretence.

To me one of the chief wonders of child-
hood has been the manner in which this
young person has picked up words, has
learned to apply them, has coined them for
herself, and has managed to equip herself
with a stock of quotations. When she was
yet little more than two and a half years old
she applied spontaneously the name Dapple-
grey to her first wooden horse. Then
Dapple-grey was pressed into guardianship
of her sleeping dolls, with this stimulative
quotation: “Brave dog, watching by the
baby’s bed.” There was some vacillation, I
recollect, as to whether it was a laburnum or

18
Her Birthday

a St. Bernard that saved travellers in the
snow, but that was exceptional. The word
“twins ’’ she adapted prettily enough. Try-
ing once in an emotional moment to put her
love for me into terms of gold currency, she
added: “And I love mother just the same ;
you two are twins, you know.” A little while
after the University boat race she drew my
attention to a doll in a _ shop-window:
“Ts n’t it beautiful? And look at its Oxford
eyes!” To “fussle one,” to disturb one by
making a fuss, seems at once fresh and use-
ful; “sorefully” is an acutely expressive
adverb; when you have to pick your steps
in wet weather the road may be conveniently
described as “ picky ;” don’t put wild roses
on the cloth at dinner lest the maid should
“crumb” them away; and when one has a
cold in the head how can one describe the
condition of one’s nose except as “‘ hoarse”?
“Lost in sad thought,” “ Now I have some-
thing to my heart’s content,” “ Few tears are
my portion,” are among the story-book
phrases which she has assimilated for week-
day use. When she was being read to out
of Kingsley’s “Heroes,” she asked her

uo)
Ww. V.

mother to substitute “the Ladies’’ for “ the’
Gorgons.” She did not like the sound of
the word; “it makes me,” drawing her
breath with a sort of shiver through her
teeth, “it makes me pull myself together.”
Once when she broke into a sudden laugh, for
sheer glee of living I suppose, she explained :
“Tam just like a little squirrel biting myself.”
Her use of the word “live” is essential
poetry; the spark “lives” inside the flint,
the catkins “live” in the Forest; and she
pointed out to me the “lines” down a
horse’s legs where the blood “lives.” A
sign-board on a piece of waste land caused
her some perplexity. It was not “ The pub-
lic are requested ” this time, but “ Forbidden
to shoot rubbish here.” Either big game or
small deer she could have understood ; but
— “Who wants to shoot rubbish, father?”

Have I sailed out of the trades into the
doldrums in telling of this commonplace
little body ? — for, after all, she is merely the
average healthy, merry, teasing, delightful
mite who tries to take the whole of life at
once into her two diminutive hands. Ah,

20
Her Birthday

well, I want some record of these good, gay
days of our early companionship ; something
that may still survive when this right hand is
dust ; a testimony that there lived at least
one man who was joyously content with the
small mercies which came to him in the
beaten way of nature. For neither of us,
little woman, can these childish, hilarious
days last much longer now. Five arch,
happy faces look out at me from the sections
of an oblong frame; all W. V.’s, but no two
the same W. V. The sixth must go. into
another frame. You must say good-bye to
the enchanted Forest, little lass, and travel -
into strange lands; and the laws of infancy
are harder than the laws of old Wales. For
these ordained that when a person remained
in a far country under such conditions that
he could not freely revisit his own, his title
to the ancestral soil was not extinguished
till the ninth man; the ninth man could
utter his “cry over the abyss,” and save his
portion. But when you have gone into the
world beyond, and can no more revisit the
Forest freely, no ear will ever listen to your
‘cry over the abyss.”
21
Ww. V.

When she had at last tired herself with
angelic visits and thrown aside her fern
wings, she returned to me and wanted to
know if I would play at shop. No, I would
not play at shop; I would be neither pur-
chaser nor proprietor, the lady she called
“Cash” nor the stately gentleman she called
“Sion.” Would I be a king, then, and
refuse my daughter to her (she would be a
prince) unless: she built a castle in a single
night; “better’n’t” she bring her box of
bricks and the dominoes? No, like Cesar,
I put by the crown. She took my refusals
cheerfully. On the whole, she is tractable
in these matters. “Fathers,” she once told
me, “know better than little girls, don’t
they?” “Oh, dear, no! how could they?
Fathers have to go into the city; they don’t
go to school like little girls.” Doubtless
there was something in that, but she per-
sisted, ‘Well, even if little girls do go to
school, fathers are wiser and know best.”
From which one father at least may derive
encouragement. Well, would I blow soap-
bubbles?

I think it was the flying thistledown in

22
Her Birthday

June which first gave us the cue of the soap-
bubbles. What a delightful game it is; and
there is a knack, too, in blowing these
spheres of fairy glass and setting them off
on their airy flight. Till you have blown
bubbles you have no conception how full of
. waywardness and freakish currents the air is.
Oh, you who are sad at heart, or weary of
thought, or irritable with physical pain, coax,
beg, borrow, or steal a four or five year old,
and betake you to blowing bubbles in the
sunshine of your recluse garden. Let the
breeze be just a little brisk to set your
bubbles drifting. Fill some of them with
tobacco smoke, and with the wind’s help
bombard the old fisherman in his web. As
the opaline globes break and the smoke
escapes in a white puff along the grass or
among the leaves, you shall think of historic
battlefields, and muse whether the greater
game was not quite as childish as this, and
“sorefully ”’ less innocent. The charges of
smoke are only a diversion ; it is the crystal
balls which delight most. The colours of
all the gems in the world run molten through
their fragile films. And what visions they

23
Ww. V.

contain for crystal-gazers! Among the gold
and green, the rose and blue, you see the
dwarfed reflection of your own trees and
your own home floating up into the sunshine.
These are your possessions, your surroundings
—so lovely, so fairylike in the bubble; in
reality so prosaic and so inadequate when
one considers the rent and rates. To W.
V. the bubbles are like the wine of the poet
— discoveries,”

Flower of the sloe
When chance annuls the worlds we blow,
Where does the soul of beauty in them go?

“Tell me a story of a little girl who lived
in a bubble,” she asked when she had tired
of creating fresh microcosms.

I lifted her on to my knee, and as she
settled herself comfortably she drew my right
arm across her breast and began to nurse it.

“Well, once upon a time —”

24
HER BOOK

25

THE INQUISITION

WOKE at dead of night ;
“The room was still as death ;
All in the dark I saw a sight
Which made me catch my breath.

Although she slumbered near,
The silence hung so deep

I leaned above her crib to hear
If it were death or sleep.

27
WwW. V.

As low —all quick — I leant,
Two large eyes thrust me back ;

Dark eyes — too wise — which gazed intent ;
Blue eyes transformed to black.

Heavens! how those steadfast eyes
Their eerie vigil kept !

Was this some angel in disguise
Who searched us while we slept ;

Who winnow’d every sin,
Who tracked each slip and fall,
One of God’s spies — not Babbykin,
Not Babbykin at all?

Day came with golden air ;
She caught the beams and smiled ;
No masked inquisitor was there,
Only a babbling child !

28
THE FIRST MIRACLE

HE huge weeds bent to let her pass,
And sometimes she crept under ;
She plunged through gulis of flowery grass ;
She filled both hands with plunder.

The buttercups grew tall as she,
Taller the big dog-daisies ;
And so she lost herself, you see,
Deep in the jungle mazes.

29
Wie

A wasp twang’d by; a hornéd snail
Leered from a great-leafed docken ;

She shut her eyes, she raised a wail
Deplorable, heart-broken.

“Mamma!” Two arms, flashed out of space
Miraculously, caught her ;

Fond mouth was pressed to tearful face —
“ What zs it, little daughter? ”’

30
BY THE FIRESIDE

Ro Robin, in the hard
white weather
She marks thee light upon the ice to rest ;
She sees the wintry glass glow with thy
breast
And let thee warm thy feet at thine own
feather. ©

3r
BY THE FIRESIDE

0

N the April sun at baby-house she plays.
Her rooms are traced with stones and
bits of bricks ;
For warmth she lays a hearth with little
sticks,
And one bright crocus makes a merry
blaze !

32
THE RAIDER

ER happy, wondering eyes had ne’er
Till now ranged summer meadows
o’er:
She would keep stopping everywhere
To fill with flowers her pinafore.

But when she saw how, green and wide,
Field followed field, and each was gay
With endless flowers, she laughed — then

sighed,
“No use!’ and threw her spoils away.
BABSIE-—BIRD

N the orchard blithely waking,
Through the blossom, loud and clear,

Pipes the goldfinch, “ Day is breaking ;
Waken, Babsie; May is here!

Bloom is laughing ; lambs are leaping ;
Every new green leaflet sings ;

Five chipp’d eggs will soon be cheeping ;
God be praised for song and wings!”

34
Her Book

Warm and ruddy as an ember,
Lilting sweet from bush to stone,
On the moor in chill November
Flits the stone-chat all alone:
* Snow will soon drift up the heather ;
Days are short, nights cold and long ;
Meanwhile in this glinting weather
God be thanked for wings and song!”

Round from Maytime to November
Babsie lilts upon the wing,
Far too happy to remember
Thanks or praise for anything ;
Save at bedtime, laughing sinner,
When she gaily lisps along,
For the wings and song within her —
“ Thank you, God, for wings and song!”

35
THE ORCHARD OF STARS

MID the orchard grass she ’d stood
and watch’d with childish glee
The big bright burning apples shower’d
like star-falls from the tree ;

So when the autumn meteors fell
she cried, with outspread gown,
“Oh my, papa, look! Isn’t God
just shaking apples down?”

36
THE SWEET PEA

()* what has been born in the night

To bask in this blithe summer morn?
She peers, in a dream of delight,

For something new-made or new-born.

Not spider-webs under the tree,
Not swifts in their cradle of mud,
But — “ Look, father, Sweet Mrs. Pea
Has two little babies in bud!”

37
BROOK-SIDE LOGIC

S the brook caught the blossoms she
cast,
Such a wonder gazed out from her face!
Why, the water was all running past,
Yet the brook never budged from its place.

Oh, the magic of what was so clear!
I explained. And _ enlightened her?
Nay —
“Why but, father, I could n’¢ stay here
If I always was running away!”

38
BUBBLE-BLOWING

UR plot is small, but sunny limes
Shut out all cares and troubles ;
And there my little girl at times
And I sit blowing bubbles.

The screaming swifts race to and fro,
Bees cross the ivied paling,

Draughts lift and set the globes we blow
In freakish currents sailing.

39
Ww. V.

They glide, they dart, they soar, they break.
Oh, joyous little daughter,

What lovely coloured worlds we make,
What crystal flowers of water !

One, green and rosy, slowly drops ;
One soars and shines a minute,

And carries to the lime-tree tops
Our home, reflected in it.

The gable, with cream rose in bloom,
She sees from roof to basement ;

“ Oh, father, there ’s your little room!”
She cries in glad amazement.

To her enchanted with the gleam,
The glamour and the glory,

The bubble home’s a home of dream,
And I must tell its story ;

Tell what we did, and how we played,
Withdrawn from care and trouble —
A father and his merry maid,
Whose house was in a bubble !
40
NEW VERSION OF AN OLD GAME

HE storm had left the rain-butt brim-
ming ;
A dahlia leaned across the brink ;
Its mirrored self, beneath it swimming,
Lit the dark water, gold and pink.

Oh, rain, far fallen from heights of azure —
Pure rain, from heavens so cold and
lone —
Dost thou not feel, and thrill with pleasure
To feel a flower’s heart in thine own?

Enjoy thy beauty, and bestow it,
Fair dahlia, fenced from harm, mishap !
“See, Babs, this flower—and this below
nite
She looked, and screamed in rapture —
Snap !”
4
THE GOLDEN SWING-BOAT

CROSS the low dim fields we caught
Faint music from a distant band —
So sweet i’ the dusk one might have thought
It floated up from elfin-land.

Then, o’er the tree-tops’ hazy blue
We saw the new moon, low i’ the air:
“Look, Dad,” she cried, “a shuggy-shue !
Why, this must be a fairies’ fair!”

42
ANOTHER NEWTON’S APPLE

E tried to show with lamp and ball
How simply day and night were
“made ;”
How earth revolved, and how through all
One half was sunshine, one was shade.

One side, tho’ turned and turned again,
Was always bright. She mused and frowned,

Then flashed — “ It’s just an apple, then,
’at’s always rosy half way round!”

Oh, boundless tree of ranging blue,
Star-fruited through thy heavenly leaves,
Be, if thou canst be, good unto
This apple-loving babe of Eve’s.

43
NATURULA NATURANS

ESIDE the water and the crumbs
She laid her little birds of clay,
For — “ When some other sparrow comes
Perhaps they ‘ll fly away.”

Ah, golden dream, to clothe with wings
A heart of springing joy ; to know

Two lives i’ the happy sum of things
To her their bliss will owe !

Day dawned ; they had not taken flight,
Tho’ playmates called from bush and tree.

She sighed: “ I hardly thought they might.
Well, — God’s more clever’n me! ”

44
WINGS AND HANDS

OD’S angels, dear, have six great wings
Of silver and of gold ;
Two round their heads, two round their
hearts,
Two round their feet they fold.

The angel of a man I know
Has just two hands — so small !

But they ’re more strong than six gold wings
To keep him from a fall.

45
FLOWERS INVISIBLE

Gre *D watched the rose-trees, how they
grew
With green hands full of flowers ;
Such flowers made ¢hezr hands sweet, she
knew,
But tenderness made ours.

So now, o’er fevered brow and eyes
Two small cold palms she closes.
“Thanks, darling!” “Oh, mamma,’ she
cries,
« Are my hands full of roses?”

46
MAKING PANSIES

if HREE faces in a hood.”
Folk called the pansy so
Three hundred years ago.
Of course she understood !

Then, perching on my knee,

She drew her mother’s head

To her own and mine, and said —
“That’s mother, you, and me!”

And so it comes about
We three, for gladness’ sake,
Sometimes a pansy make
Before the gas goes out.

47
HEART-EASE

AST June — how slight a thing to tell !—
One straggling leaf beneath the limes
Against the sunset rose and fell,
Making a rhythm with coloured rhymes.

No other leaf in all the air
Seemed waking; and my little maid
Watched with me, from the garden-chair,
Its rhythmic play of light and shade.

Now glassy gold, now greenish grey,

It dropped, it lifted. That was all.
Strange I should still feel glad to-day

To have seen that one leaf lift and fall.

48
“SI JAVAIS UN ARPENT”

H, had I but a plot of earth, on plain
or vale or hill,
With running water babbling through, in
torrent, spring, or rill,

I’d plant a tree, an olive or an oak or willow
tree,

And build a roof of thatch, or tile, or reed,
for mine and me.
WwW. V.

Upon my tree a nest of moss, or down, or
wool, should hold

A songster— finch or thrush or blackbird

with its bill of gold ;

Beneath my roof a child, with brown. or
blond or chestnut hair,

Should find in hammock, cradle or crib a
nest, and slumber there.

I ask for but a little plot; to measure my
domain

I’d say to Babs, my bairn of bliss, “Go,
alderliefest wean,

“And stand against the rising sun; your
shadow on the grass

Shall trace the limits of my world; beyond I
shall not pass.

“The happiness one can’t attain is dream
and glamour-shine !”

These rhymes are Soulary’s; the thoughts
are Babs’s thoughts and mine.

50
HER FRIEND LITTLEJOHN

or


Her way of “ playing at botany”
HER FRIEND LITTLEJOHN

HE first time Littlejohn saw W. V.—a
year or so ago-—she was sitting on
the edge of a big red flower-pot, into which
she had managed to pack herself. A. bril-
liant Japanese sunshade was tilted over her
shoulder, and close by stood a large green
watering-can. This was her way of “ playing
at botany,” but as the old gardener could
not be prevailed upon to water her, there
was not as much fun in the game as there
ought to have been.

W. V. was accordingly consoling herself
with telling “Mr. Sandy’ — the recalcitrant
gardener —the authentic and _ incredible
story of the little girl who was “just ’scruci-
atingly good.”

Later, on an idyllic afternoon among the
heather, Littlejohn heard all about that excel-

53
Ww. V«.

lent and too precipitate child, who was so
eager to oblige or obey that she rushed off
before she could be told what to do; and
as this was the only story W. V. knew which
had obviously a moral, W. V. made it a
great point to explain that “little girls ought
not to be too good; ¢f— chey — only — did
— what— they — were — told they would be
good enough.”

W. V.’s mother had been taken seriously ill
a few weeks before, and as a house of sickness
is not the best place for a small child, nor a
small child the most soothing presence in a
patient’s room, W. V. had undertaken a mar-
vellous and what seemed an interminable jour-
ney into the West Highlands. Her host and
hostess were delighted with her and her odd
sayings and quaint, fanciful ways; and ghe,
in the plenitude of her good-nature, extended
a cheerful patronage to the grown-up people.
Littlejohn had no children of his own, and it
was a novel delight, full of charming sur-
prises, to have a sturdy, imperious, sunny-
hearted little body of four and a half as his
constant companion. The child was pretty
enough, but it was the alert, excitable little

54
Her Friend Littlejohn

soul of her which peered and laughed out of
her blue eyes that took him captive.

Like most healthy children, W. V. did
not understand what sorrow, sickness, or
death meant. Indeed it is told of her that
she once exclaimed gleefully, “Oh, see,
here’s a funeral! Which is the bride?”
The absence of her mother did not weigh
upon her. Once she awoke at night and
cried for her; and on one or two occasions,
in a sentimental mood, she sighed “ I should
like to see my father! Don’t you think we
could ‘run over’?”” The immediate pres-
ent, its fun and nonsense and grave respon-
sibilities, absorbed all her energies and
‘attention ; and what a divine dispensation it
is that we who never forget can be forgotten
so easily.

I fancy, from what I have heard, that she
must have regarded Littlejohn’s ignorance
of the ways of children as one of her respon-
sibilities. It was really very deplorable to
find a great-statured, ruddy-bearded fellow
of two-and-thirty so absolutely wanting in
tact, so incapable of “ pretending,”’ so desti-
tute of the capacity of rhyming or of telling

55
W. V«.

a story. The way she took him in hand
was kindly yet resolute. It began with her
banging her head against something and
howling. “Don’t cry, dear,” Littlejohn had
entreated, with the crude pathos of an ama-
teur; “come, don’t cry.”

When W. V. had heard enough of this she
looked at him disapprovingly, and said,
«You should n’t say that. You should just
laugh and say, ‘Come, let me kiss that crystal
tear away!’ “Say it!” she added after a
pause. This was Littlejohn’s first lesson in
the airy art of consolation.

Littlejohn as a lyric poet was a melancholy
spectacle.

“Now, you say, ‘Come, let us go,’” W.
V. would command.

“T don’t know it, dear.”

“Tl say half for you —

“Come, let us go where the people sell —”

But Littlejohn had n’t the slightest notion
of what they sold.
“Bananas,” W. V. prompted ; “say it.”
« Bananas.”
“ And what?”
56
Her Friend Littlejohn

“Oranges?” Littlejohn hazarded.

“Pears!” cried W. V. reproachfully ;
“say it!”

“« Pears.”

“ And—” with pauses to give her host
chances of retrieving his honour; “ pine —
ap — pel! —

‘Bananas and pears and pine-appél,’

of course. I don’t think you caz publish a
poem.”

“JT don’t think I can, dear,” Littlejohn
confessed after a roar of laughter.

“ Papa and I published that poem. Pine-
appél made me laugh at first. And after
that you say —

‘ Away to the market! and let us buy
A sparrow to make asparagus pie.’

1»

Say it
So in time Littlejohn found his memory
becoming rapidly stocked with all sorts of
nonsensical rhymes and ridiculous pronun-
ciations.
Inability to rhyme, like inability to reason,
is a gift of nature, and one can overlook it,

57
WwW. V.

but Littlejohn’s sheer imbecility in face of
the demand for a story was a sore trial to
W. V. After an impatient lesson or two,
the way in which he picked up a substitute
for imagination was really exceedingly credi-
table. Having spent a day in the “ Forest”
— W. V. could pack some of her forests in a
nutshell, and feel herself a woodlander of
infinite verdure — Littlejohn learned which
trees were “pappa-trees”’; how to knock
and ask if any one was in; how to make the
dog inside bark if there was no one; how to
get an answer in the affirmative if he asked
whether they could give his little girl a bis-
cuit, or a pear, or a plum; how to discover
the fork in the branches where the gift would
be found, and how to present it to W. V.
with an air of inexhaustible surprise and
delight. Every Forest is full of “ pappa-
trees,” as every verderer knows; the crux of
the situation presents itself when the tenant
of the tree is cross, or the barking dog inti-
mates that he has gone “to the City.”

Now, about a mile from Cloan Den, Little-
john’s house, there was a bit of the real
“old ancient” Caledonian Forest. There

58
Her Friend Littlejohn

was not much timber, it is true, but still
enough ; and occasionally one came across
a shattered shell of oak, which might have
been a pillar of cloudy foliage in the days
when woad was the fashionable dress mate-
rial. I have reason to believe that W. V.
invested all that wild region with a rosy
atmosphere of romance for Littlejohn.
Every blade of grass and fringe of larch was
alive with wood-magic. She trotted about
with him holding his hand, or swinging on
before him with her broad boyish shoulders
thrown well back and an air of unconscious
proprietorship of man and nature.

It was curious to note how her father’s
stories had taken hold of her, and Little-
john, with some surprise at himself and at
the nature of things at large, began to fancy
he saw motive and purpose in some of these
fantastic narratives. The legend of the girl
that was “just ’scruciatingly good”’ had evi-
dently been intended to correct a possible
tendency towards priggishness. The boy
whose abnormal badness expressed itself in
“T don’t care’ could not have been so
irredeemably wicked, or he would never have

59
W. V.

succeeded in locking the bear and tiger up
in the tree and leaving them there to dine
off each other. And all the stories about
little girls who got lost — there were several
of these —were evidently lessons against
fright and incentives to courage and self-
confidence.

W. V. quite believed that if a little girl
got bewildered in the underwood the grass
would whisper “This way, this way!” or
some little furry creature would look up at
her with its sharp beady eyes and tell her to
follow. Even though one were hungry and
thirsty as well as lost, there was nothing to
be afraid of, if there were only oaks in the
Forest. For when once on a time a little
girl—whose name, strangely enough, was
W. V.— got lost and began to cry, did not
the door of an oak-tree open and a little,
little, wee man all dressed in green, with
green boots and a green feather in his cap,
come out and ask her to “step inside,” and
have some fruit and milk? And didn’t he
say, “When you get lost, don’t keep going
this way and going that way and going the
other way, but keep straight on and you are

60
Her Friend Littlejohn

sure to come out at the other side? Only
poor wild things in cages at the Zoo keep
going round and round.”

And that is “truly and really,” W. V.
would add, “because I saw them doing it
at the Zoo.”

Even at the risk of being tedious, I must
finish the story, for it was one that greatly
delighted Littlejohn and haunted him in a
pleasant fashion. Well, when this little girl who
was lost had eaten the fruit and drunk the milk,
she asked the wee green oak-man to go with
her a little way, as it was growing dusk. And
he said he would. Then he whistled, and
close to, and then farther away, and still
farther and farther, other little oak-men whis-
tled in answer, till all the Forest was full of
the sound of whistling. And the oak-man
shouted, “ Will you help this little girl out? ”
and you could hear “ Yes, yes, yes, yes,” far
away right and left, to the very end of the
Forest. And the oak-man walked a few
yards with her, and pointed; and she saw
another oak and another oak-man; and so
she went on from one to another right
through the Forest; and she said, “ Thank

61
Ww. V«.

you, Mr. Oak-man,” to each of them, and
bent down and gave each of them a kiss,
and they all laughed because they were
pleased, and when she got out she could
still hear them laughing quietly together.

Another story that pleased Littlejohn
hugely, and he liked W. V. to tell it as he
lay in a hollow among the heather with his
bonnet pulled down to the tip of his nose,
was about the lost little girl who walked
among the high grass —it was quite up to
her eyes—till she was “tired to death.”
So she lay down, and just as she was begin-
ning to doze off she heard a very soft voice
humming her to’ sleep, and she felt warm
soft arms snuggling her close to a warm
breast. And as she was wondering who it
could be that was so kind to her, the soft
voice whispered, “It is only mother, dearie ;
sleep-a-sleep, dearie ; only mother cuddling
her little girl.” And when she woke there
was no one there, and she had been lying
in quite a little grassy nest in the hollow of
the ground.

Littlejohn himself could hardly credit the
change which this voluble, piquant, imperious

62
Her Friend Littlejohn

young person had made not only in the
ways of the house, but in his very being
and in the material landscape itself. One
of the oddest and most incongruous things
he ever did in his life was to measure W. V.
against a tree and inscribe her initials (her
father always called her by her initials and
she liked that form of her name best), and
his own, and the date, above the score which
marked her height.

The late summer and the early autumn
passed delightfully in this fashion. There
was some talk at intervals of W. V. being
packed, labelled, and despatched “with
care’? to her own woods and oak-men in
the most pleasant suburb of the great
metropolis, but it never came to anything.
Her father was persuaded to spare her just
a little longer. The patter of the little feet,
the chatter of the voluble, cheery voice, had
grown well-nigh indispensable to Littlejohn
and his wife, for though I have confined
myself to Littlejohn’s side of the story, I
would not have it supposed that W. V.’s
charm did not radiate into other lives.

So the cold rain and the drifted leaf, the

63
WANS

. first frost and the first snow came; and in
their train come Christmas and the Christ-
mas-tree and the joyful vision of Santa Claus.

Now to make a long story short, a polite
note had arrived at Cloan Den asking for the
pleasure of Miss W. V.’s company at Bar-
geddie Mains — about a mile and a half be-
yond the “ old ancient ”’ Caledonian Forest —
where a Christmas-tree was to be despoiled of
its fairy fruitage. The Bargeddie boys would
drive over for Miss W. V. in the afternoon,
and “ Uncle Big-John” would perhaps come
for the young lady in the evening, unless in-
deed he would change his mind and allow
her to stay all night.

Uncle Big-John, of course, did not change
his mind ; and about nine o’clock he reached
the Mains. It was a sharp moonlight night,
and the wide snowy strath sweeping away up
to the vast snow-muffled Bens looked like a
silvery expanse of fairyland. So far as I can
gather it must have been well on the early
side of ten when Littlejohn and W. V. (re-
joicing in the spoils of the Christmas-tree)
bade the Bargeddie people good-night and
started homeward — the child warmly muf-

64
Her Friend Littlejohn

fled, and chattering and laughing hilariously
as she trotted along with her hand in his.

It has often since been a subject of wonder
that Littlejohn did not notice the change of
the weather, or that, having noticed it, he
did not return for shelter to the Mains. But
we are all too easily wise after the event, and
it is to be remembered that the distance from
home was little over three miles, and that
Littlejohn was a perfect giant of a man.

They could have hardly been more than
half a mile from Bargeddie when the snow
storm began. The sparse big flakes thick-
ened, the wind rose bitterly cold, and then,
in a fierce smother of darkness, the moonlight
was blotted out. For what follows the story
depends principally on the recollections of
W. V., and in a great measure on one’s
knowledge of Littlejohn’s nature.

The biting cold and the violence of the wind
soon exhausted the small traveller. Little-
john took her in his arms, and wrapped her
in his plaid. For some time they kept to
the highroad, but the bitter weather suggested
the advisability of taking a crow-line across
the Forest.

5 65
Ww. V.~.

“You’re a jolly heavy lumpumpibus, In-
fanta,”’ Littlejohn said with a laugh; “I
think we had better try a short cut for once
through the old oaks.”

When they got into some slight cover
among the younger trees, Littlejohn paused
to recover his breath. It was still blowing
and snowing heavily.

“Now, W. V., I think it would be as well
if you knocked up some of your little green
oak-men, for the Lord be good to me if I
know where we are.”

“ You must knock,” said W. V., “but I
don’t think you will get any bananas.”

W. V. says that Littlejohn did knock and
that the bark of the dog showed that the oak-
man was not at home!

“T rather thought he would not be, W.
V.,” said Littlejohn; “they never are at
home except only to the little people. We
big ones have to take care of ourselves.”

“The oak-man said, ‘Keep straight on,
and you’re sure to come out at the other
side,’ W. V. reminded him.

“The oak-man spoke words of wisdom,
Infanta,” said Littlejohn. ‘Come along, W.

66
Her Friend Littlejohn

Vv.” And he lifted the child again in his
arms. “Are you cold, my dearie-girl?”’

“No, only my face; but I am so sleepy.”

“And so heavy, W. V. I didn’t think a
little girl cowld be so heavy. Come along,
and let us try keeping straight on. The
other side must be somewhere.”

How long he trudged on with the child in
his arms and the bewildering snow beating
and clotting on them both will never be
known. W.V., with a spread of his plaid
over her face, fell into a fitful slumber, from
which she was awakened by a fall and a
scramble.

“You poor helpless bairn,” he groaned,
“have I hurt you?”

W. V. was not hurt; the snow-wreath had
been too deep for that.

“Well, you see, W. V., we came a lament-
able cropper that time,” said Littlejohn. “I
think we must rest a little, for I’m fagged
out. You see, W. V., there is no grass to
whisper, ‘This way, this way ;’ and there are
no furry things to say, ‘Follow me ;’ and the
oak-men are all asleep; and—and, God
forgive me, I don’t know what to do!”

67
Ww. V.

“Are you crying, Uncle Big-John?”
asked W.V.; for “his voice sounded just
like as if he was crying,” she explained
afterwards.

“Crying! no, my dear; there’s no need
to kiss the crystal tear away! But, you see,
I’m tired, and it’s jolly cold and dark ; and,
as Mother Earth is good to little children
——” He paused to see how he should
be best able to make herunderstand. “ You
remember how that little girl that was lost
went to sleep in a hollow of the grass and
heard the Mother talking to her? Well,
you must just lie snug like that, you
see.”

“ But I’m not lost.”

“ Of course, you’re not lost. Only you
must lie snug and sleep till it stops snowing,
and I'll sit beside you.”

Littlejohn took off his plaid and his thick
tweed jacket. He wrapped the child in the
latter, and half covered her with snow.
With the plaid, propped up with his stick, he
made a sort of tent to shelter her from the
driving flakes. He then lay down beside her
till she fell asleep.

68
Her Friend Littlejohn

“It’s only mother, dearie; mother cud-
dling her little girl; sleep-a-sleep.”

Then he must have arisen shuddering in
his shirt-sleeves, and have lashed his arms
again and again about his body for warmth.

In the hollow in which they were found,
the snow-wreath, with the exception of a
narrow passage, a few feet in width where
they had blundered in, was impassably deep
on all sides. All round and round the
hollow the snow was very much trampled.

Worn out with fatigue and exposure, the
strong man had at last lain down beside the
child. His hand was under his head.

In that desperate circular race against cold
and death he must have been struck by his
own resemblance to the wild creatures pad-
ding round and round in their cages in the
Zoo, and what irony he must have felt in
the counsel of the wee green oak-man.
Well, he had followed the advice, had he
not? And, when he awoke, would he not
find that he had come out at the other side?

Hours afterwards, when at last Littlejohn
slowly drifted back to consciousness, he lay
69
WwW. V.«.

staring for a moment or two witha dazed be-
wildered brain. ‘Then into his eyes there
flashed a look of horror, and he struggled to
pull himself together. “My God, my God,
where is the Infant?” he groaned.

W. V. was hurried into the room, oblivi-
ously radiant. With a huge sigh Littlejohn
sank back smiling, and held out his hand to
her. Whereupon W. V., moving it gently
aside, went up close to him and spoke, half
in inquiry half in remonstrance, “You ’re zo?
going to be died, are you?”

70
HER BED-TIME

71
an

: :


HER BED-TIME

N these winter evenings, thanks to the
Great Northern, and to Hesperus who
brings all things home, I reach my door-
step about half-an-hour before W. V.’s bed-
time. A sturdy, rosy, flaxen-haired little
body opens to my well-known knock, takes
a kiss on the tip of her nose, seizes my um-
brella, and makes a great show of assisting
me with my heavy overcoat. She leads me
into the dining-room, gets my slippers, runs
my bootlaces into Gordian knots in her im-
petuous zeal, and announces that she has
“set”? the tea. At table she slips furtively
on to my knee, and we are both happy till a
severe voice, ‘“‘ Now, father!” reminds us of
the reign of law in general, and of that law
in particular which enacts that it is shocking
in little girls to want everything they see,

73
W. V.«.

and most reprehensible in elderly people
(I elderly!) to encourage them.

We are glad to escape to the armchair,
where, after I have lit my pipe and W. V.
has blown the elf of flame back to fairyland,
we conspire —not overtly indeed, but each
in his deep mind — how we shall baffle do-
mestic tyranny and evade, if but for a few
brief minutes of recorded time, the cubicular
moment and the inevitable hand of the bath-
maiden.

The critical instant occurs about half-way
through my first pipe, and W. V.’s devices
for respite or escape are at once innumerable
and transparently ingenious. I admit my
connivance without a blush, though I may
perchance weakly observe: ‘‘One sees so
little of her, mother ;’’ for how delightful it
is when she sings or recites—and no one
would be so rude as to interrupt a song or
recitation — to watch the little hands waving
in “the air so blue,” the little fingers flick-
ering above her head in imitation of the
sparks at the forge, the little arms nursing
an imaginary weeping dolly, the blue eyes lit
up with excitement as they gaze abroad from

74
Her Bed-time

the cherry-tree into the “foreign lands”
beyond the garden wall.

She has much to tell me about the day’s
doings. Yes, she Aas been clay-modelling.
I have seen some of her marvellous baskets
of fruit and birds’ nests and ivy leaves;
but to-day she has been doing what dear
old Mother Nature did in one of her happy
moods some millenniums ago — making a
sea with an island in it; and around the sea
mountains, one a volcano with a crater blaz-
ing with red crayon; and a river with a
bridge across it; quite a boldly conceived
and hospitable fragment of a new planet.
Of course Miss Jessie helped her, but she
would soon be able, all by herself, to create
a new world in which there should be ever-
blossoming spring and a golden age, and
fairies to make the impossible common-
place. W. V. does not put it in that way,
but those, I fancy, would be the character-
istics of a universe of her happy and inno-
cent contriving.

In her early art days W. V. was distinctly
Darwinian. Which was the cow, and which
the house, and which the lady, was always a

75
W. V«.

nice question. One could differentiate with
the aid of a few strokes of natural selection,
but essentially they were all of the same pro-
toplasm. Her explanations of her pictures
afforded curious instances of the easy magic
with which a breath of her little soul made
all manner of dry bones live. I reproached
her once with wasting paper which she had
covered with a whirling scribble. “Why,
father,’”’ she exclaimed with surprise, “ that ’s
the north wind!” Her latest masterpiece
is a drawing of a stone idol; but it is only
exhibited on condition that, when you see it,
you must “shake with fright.”

At a Kindergarten one learns, of course,
many things besides clay-modelling, draw-
ing, and painting: poetry, for instance, and
singing, and natural history; drill and ball-
playing and dancing. And am I not curious
— this with a glance at the clock which is on
the stroke of seven — to hear the new verse
of her last French song? Shall she recite
“ Purr, purr!” or “The Swing’? Or would
it not be an agreeable change to have her
sing “Up into the Cherry Tree,” or “The
Busy Blacksmith ” ?

46
Her Bed-time

Any or all of these would be indeed de-
lectable, but parting is the same sweet sorrow
at the last as at the first. However, we shall
have one song. And after that a recitation
by King Alfred! The king is the most
diminutive of china dolls dressed in green
velvet. She steadies him on the table by
one leg, and crouches down out of sight
while he goes through his performance.
The Fauntleroy hair and violet eyes are the
eyes and hair of King Alfred, but the voice
is the voice of W. V.

When she has recited and sung I draw her
between my knees and begin: “ There was
once a very naughty little girl, and her name
was W. V.”

“No, father, a good little girl.”

“Well, there was a good little girl, and
her name was Gladys.”

“ No, father, a good little girl called W. V.”

“ Well, a good little girl called W. V.; and
she was ‘quickly obedient’; and when her
father said she was to go to bed, she said:
‘Yes, father,’ and she just fzew, and gave no
trouble.”

« And did her father come up and kiss her?”

77
Ww. V.

« Why, of course, he did.”

A few minutes later she is kneeling on the
bed with her head nestled in my breast,
repeating her evening prayer : —

“Dear Father, whom I cannot see,
Smile down from heaven on little me.

Let angels through the darkness spread
Their holy wings about my bed.

And keep me safe, because I am
The heavenly Shepherd’s little lamb.

Dear God our Father, watch and keep
Father and mother while they sleep ;

“and bless Dennis, and Ronnie, and Uncle
John, and Auntie Bonnie, and Phyllis (did
Phyllis used to squint when she was a baby?
Poor Phyllis!) ; and Madame, and Lucille
(she is only a tiny little child; a quarter
past three years or something like that) ;
and Ivo and Wilfrid (he has bronchitis
very badly; he can’t come out this winter ;
aren’t you sorry for him? Really a dear
little boy).”
«‘ Any one else?”
78
Her Bed-time

“ Auntie Edie and Grandma. (#e will
have plenty to do, won’t He?) ”
«And ‘ Teach me’” — I suggest.

“Teach me to do what I am told,
And help me to be good as gold.”

And a whisper comes from the pillow as I
tuck in the eider-down, —

“ Now He will be wondering whether I
am going to be a good girl.”

79

VARIOUS VERSES.

EAST OF EDEN

AR down upon the plain the large round
moon
Sank red in jungle mist; but on the
heights
The coid clear darkness burned with restless
stars :
And, restless as the stars, the grim old King
Paced with fierce choleric strides the mon-
strous ridge
Of boulders piled to make the city wall.
Muttering his wrath within his cloudy beard,
He moved, and paused, and turned. The
starlight caught
The huge bent gold that ringed his giant
head,

83
W. V~.

Gleamed on the jewel-fringed vast lion-
fells

That clothed his stature, ran in dusky play

Along the ponderous bronze that armed his
spear.

He fiercely scanned the East for signs of
dawn ;

Then shook his clenchéd hand above his
head,

And blazed with savage eyes and brow thrown
back

To front the awful Presence he addressed :

“Slay and make end; or take some mortal
form

That I may strive with Thee! Art Thou so
strong

And yet must smite me out of Thine Un-
seen?

Long centuries have passed since Thou didst
place

Thy mark upon me, lest at any time

Men finding me should slay me. I have
grown

84
East of Eden

Feeble and hoary with the toil of years —

An aged palsy — now, alas, no more

That erst colossal adamant whereon

Thine hand engraved its vengeance. Be
Thou just,

And answer when I charge Thee. Have I
blenched

Before Thy fury ; have I bade Thee spare ;

Hath Thy long torture wrung one sob of
pain,

One cry of supplication from my mouth?

But Thou hast made Thyself unseen; hast
lain

In ambush to afflict me. Day and night

Thou hast been watchful. Thy vindictive

eyes

Have known no’ slumber. Make Thyself a
man

That I may seize Thee in my grips, and
strive

But once on equal terms with Thee — but
once.

Or send Thine angel with his sword of
fire —

But no; not him! Come Thou, come Thou
Thyself ;

85
WwW. V.

Come forth from Thine Invisible, and face
In mortal guise the mortal Thou has
plagued!”

The race of giants, sunk in heavy sleep
Within the cirque of those cyclopean walls,
Heard as it were far thunder in their dreams ;
But answer came there none from cloud or
star.

Then cried the aged King;

“ A curse consume
Thy blind night fevered with the glare of stars,
Wild voices, and the agony of dreams !
Would it were day!”

At last the gleam of dawn
Swept in a long grey shudder from the East,
Then reddened o’er the misty jungle tracts.
The guards about the massive city gates
Fell back with hurried whispers: “’Tis the
King!”
And forth, with great white beard and gold-
girt brows,
Huge spear, and jewelled fells, the giant strode
To slake his rage among the beasts of prey.
86
East of Eden

The fierce white splendour of a tropic noon;

A sweltering waste of jungle, breathing flame ;

The sky one burning sapphire !

By a spring

Within the shadow of a bluff of rock

The hoary giant rested. At his feet

The cool green mosses edged the crystal
pool,

And flowers of blue and gold and rose-red
lulled :

The weary eye with colour. As he sat

There rose a clamour from the sea of
canes ;

He heard a crash of boughs, a rush of feet ;

And, lo! there bounded from the tangled
growth

A panting tiger mad with pain and rage.

The beast sprang roaring, but the giant
towered

And pashed with one fell buffet bone and
brain ;

Then staggered with a groan, for, keen and
swift,

At that same instant from the jungle flew

A shaft which to the feather pierced his
frame.

87
Ww. V.

Shrill cries of horror maddened round the
bluff:

* Oh, Elohim, ’t is Cain the King, the King!”

And weeping, tearing hair, and wringing
hands,

About him raved his lawless giant brood.

But Cain spoke slowly with a ghastly smile:
“ Peace, and give heed, for now I am but dead.
~Let no man be to blame for this my death;
Yea, swear a solemn oath that none shall
harm
A hair of him who gives me my release.
Come hither, boy!”
And, weeping, Lamech went
And stood before the face of Cain ; and Cain
Who pressed a hand against his rushing
wound
Reddened his grandson’s brow and kissed his
cheek:
_ “The blood of Cain alight on him who lifts
A hand against thy life. My spear, boys! So.
Let no foot follow. Cain must die alone.
Let no man seek me till ye see in heaven
A sign, and know that Cain is dead.”
88
East of Eden

He smiled,
And from the hollow of his hand let fall
A crimson rain upon the crystal spring,
Which caught the blood in glassy ripple and
whirl,
And reddened moss and boulder.
Swift of stride,
With gold-girt brow thrown back to front the
Unseen,
The hoary giant through the jungle waste
Plunged, muttering in his beard; and on-
ward pressed
Through the deep tangle of the trackless

growth

To reach some lair, where hidden and un-
heard

His savage soul in its last strife might
cope

With God — perchance one moment visible.

A sweltering tract of jungle, breathing flame ;
A fiery silence; all the depth of heaven

One blinding sapphire !

: Watching by the cliff,
The giant brood stood waiting for the sign,

89
W. V~.

Behold ! a speck, high in the blazing blue,

Hung black — asingle speck above the waste ;

Hung poised an hour ; then dropped through
leagues of air,

Plumb as a stone ; and as it dropped they saw

Through leagues of high blue air, to north
and south,

To east and west, black specks that sprang
from space,

And then long sinuous lines of distant spots

Which flew converging — growing, as they
flew, .

To slanting streams and palpitating swarms;

Which flew converging out of all the heavens,

And blackened, as they flew, the sapphire
blaze,

And jarred the fiery hush with winnowing
wings ;

Which flew converging on a single point

Deep in the jungle waste, and, as they
swooped,

Paused in the last long slide with dangling
claws,

Then dropped like stone.

Thus knew the giant brood
That Cain was dead.

go
East of Eden

Beside a swamp they found
Hoar hair, a litter of white colossal bones,
Ensanguined shreds of jewelled lion-fells,
The huge gold crown and ponderous spear

of Cain,

And, fixed between the ribs, the fatal shaft
Which Lamech shot unwitting ; but against
The life of Lamech no man lifted hand.

gr
GOODWIN SANDS

ID you ever read or hear
How the Aid — (God bless the Aid /
More earnest prayer than that was never
prayed.)
How the lifeboat, Azd of Ramsgate, saved the
London Fusilier ?

With a hundred souls on board,

With a hundred and a score,

— She was fast on Goodwin Sands,

— (May the Lord

Have pity on all hands —

Crew and captain—when a ship’s on
Goodwin Sands !)

g2
Goodwin Sands

In the smother and the roar

Of a very hell of waters — hard and fast —

She shook beneath the stroke

Of each billow as it broke,

And the clouds of spray were mingled with
the clouds of swirling smoke

As the blazing barrels bellowed in the blast !

And the women and the little ones were
frozen dumb with fear ;

And the strong men waited grimly for the
last ;

When—as clocks were striking two in
Ramsgate town —

The little Aid came down,

The Azd, the plucky Az7—

The Azd flew down the gale

With the glimmer of the moon upon her
sail ;

And the people thronged to leeward ; stared
and prayed —

Prayed and stared with tearless eye and

breathless lip,
While the little boat drew near.
Ay, and then there rose a shout —

93
W. V«.

A clamour, half a sob and half a cheer —

As the boatmen flung the lifeboat anchor out,

And the gallant Azd sheered in beneath the
ship, y

Beneath the shadow of the London Fusther /

“ We can carry may be thirty at a trip”
(Hurrah for Ramsgate town ! )
“ Quick, the women and the children /”

O’er the side
Two sailors, slung in bowlines, hung to help
the women down —
Poor women, shrinking back in their dismay
As they saw their ark of refuge, smothered
up in spray,
Ranging wildly this and that way in the rac-
ing of the tide ;
As they watched it rise and drop, with its
crew of stalwart men,
When a huge sea swung it upward to the
bulwarks of the ship,
And, sweeping by in thunder, sent it plung-
ing down again.
94
Goodwin Sands

Still they shipped them — nine-and-twenty.
(God be blessed ! )

When a man with glaring eyes

Rushed up frantic to the gangway with a cry
choked in his throat —

Thrust a bundle in a sailor’s ready hands.

Honest Jack, Ze understands —.

Why, a blanket for a woman in the boat !

“ Catch tt, Bill!”

And he flung it with a will;

And the boatman turned and caught it, bless
him !— caught it, tho’ it slipped,

And, even as he caught it, heard an infant’s
cries,

While a woman shrieked, and snatched it to
her breast —

* My baby!”
So the thirtieth passenger was shipped !

Twice, and thrice, and yet again
Flew the lifeboat down the gale
With the moonlight on her sail —
With the sunrise on her sail —

95
WwW. V«.

(God bless the lifeboat Azd and all her men !)

Brought her thirty at a trip

Thro’ the hell of Goodwin waters as they
raged around the ship,

Saved each soul aboard the Loudon Fusilier /

If you live to be a hundred, you will ne’er —
You will ne’er in all your life,

Until you die, my dear,

Be nearer to your death by land or sea!

Was she there?
Who? — my wife?
Why, the baby in the blanket — that was she !

96
TRAFALGAR

THE merry bells of Chester, ancient
Chester on the Dee !
On that glittering autumn morning,
eighteen five,
Every Englishman was glad to be
alive.
It was good to breathe this English air, to see
English earth, with autumn field and redden-
ing tree,
And to hear the bells of Chester, ancient
Chester on the Dee.

7 97
Ww. V.

For like morning-stars together, sweet and
shrill,
In a blithe recurrent cycle
Sang St. Peter and St. Michael,
John the Baptist and St. Mary on the Hill ;
And the quick exulting changes of their peal
Made the heavens above them laugh, and
the jubilant city reel.
In the streets the crowds were cheering.
Like a shout
From each spire the bickering bunting rol-
licked out.

O that buoyant autumn morning, eighteen
five,

Every Englishman rejoiced to be alive ;

And the heart of England throbbed from sea
to sea

As the joy-bells clashed in Chester, jovial
Chester on the Dee.

Hark, in pauses of the revel—sole and
slow —
Old St. Werburgh swung a heavy note of woe !

98
Trafalgar

Hark, between the jocund peals a single
toll,

Stern and muffled, marked the passing of a
soul !

English hearts were sad that day as sad
could be;

English eyes so filled with tears they scarce
could see ;

And all the joy was dashed with grief in
ancient Chester on the Dee!

Loss and triumph—joy and sorrow! Far
away

Drave the great fight’s wreckage down
Trafalgar Bay.

O that glorious autumn morning, eighteen five,

Every Englishman was proud to be alive !

For the power of France was broken on the
sea —

But ten sail left of her thirty sail and three.

Yet sad were English men as sad could be,

For that, somewhere o’er the foreign wave,
they knew

Home to English ground and grass the dust
of Nelson drew.

99
W. V.

Would to God that on that morning, eighteen
five,

England’s greatest man of all had been alive,

If but to breathe this English air, to see

English earth, with autumn field and yellow-
ing tree,

And to hear the -bells of Chester, joyful
Chester on the Dee!

I0o
VIGNETTES

IOL

THE WANDERER

MET a waif i’ the hills at close of day.
He begged an alms; I thought to say
him nay.
What was he? “Sir, a little dust,’ said he,
“Which life blows up and down, and death
will lay.”

I gave — for love of beast and hill and tree,
And all the dust that has been and shall be.

103
THE WANDERER

Il

E knows no home; he only knows
Hunger and cold and pain ;
The four winds are his bedfellows ;
His sleep is dashed with rain.

"Tis naught to him who fails, who thrives;
He neither hopes nor fears ;

Some dim primeval impulse drives
His footsteps down the years.

104
The Wanderer

He could not, if he would, forsake
Lone road and field and tree.

Yet, think! it takes a God to make
E’en such a waif as he.

And once a maiden, asked for bread,
Saw, as she gave her dole,

No friendless vagrant, but, instead,
An indefeasible Soul.

105
THE SCARECROW

AIL Goodman-gossip of the corn !
When. boughs are green and furrows
sprout
And blossom muffles every thorn,
Poor soul! the farmer boards him out.

Men think, grim wight, his rags affright

The wingéd thieves from root and ear;
But on his hat pert sparrows light —

Crows have been friends too long to fear!

The schoolboy’s sling he heedeth not ;
No rancour nerves those palsied hands ;
In shocking hat and ancient coat,
A crazed and patient wretch he stands.
106
The Scarecrow

Without a murmur in the wheat,

Till fields are shorn and harvest’s won,
He suffers cold, he suffers heat,

From chilly stars and scorching sun.

Though men forget, he dreameth yet
How in the golden past he stood,
’Mid flowers and wine, a shape divine

Of marble or of carven wood ;

How, in the loveliness and peace
Of that blithe age and radiant clime,
He was a garden-god of Greece.
Oh, vanished world! Oh, fleeting time !

Gaunt simulacrum — ghost forlorn —
Grey exile from a splendid past —

Last god (in rags) of a creed outworn —
If pity ’ll help thee, mine thou hast!

107
THE HAUNTED BRIDGE

ITH high-pitched arch, low parapet,
And narrow thoroughfare, it stands
As strong as when the mortar set
Beneath the Roman mason’s hands.

An ancient ivy grips its walls,
Tall grasses tuft its coping-stones ;
Beneath, through citron shadow, falls
The stream in drowsy undertones.

108
The Haunted Bridge

No road leads hence. The stonechat flits
Along green fallow grey with stone ;
But here a dark-eyed urchin sits,
To whom the Painted Men were known.

Hush! do not move, but only look.
When sunny days are long and fine

This Roman truant baits a hook,
Drops o’er the keystone here a line,

And, dangling sandalled feet, looks down
To see the swift trout dart and gleam —
Or scarcely see them, hanging brown
With heads against the clear brown stream.

109g
THE STONE AGE

3 WAS not a vision! Yet the oak
O’erarched the paleolithic Age ;
And homesteads of a pigmy folk
Were clustered ’neath its foliage.

Secreted in that sylvan space,
To archzeologist unknown,

Stood, reared by some untutored race,
Strange rings and avenues of stone.

The little thorp deserted seemed ;
What prey had lured the tribe afar?
One figure, lingering, sat and dreamed,
As lonely as the evening star.
110
The Stone Age

Bright-haired, blue-eyed, with naked feet,
And young face lit with rosy blood,

She rocked her babe, and dreamed the sweet
Primeval dream of motherhood.

A wondrous babe, that once had grown
A branch among the branches green —
For nurslings of the Age of Stone
Are mainly bairns of wood, I ween.

A mother strangely young, and sage
Beyond the summers she had told,
For mothers of that ancient Age
Are usually five years old.

God bless thy heart maternal, bless

Thy bower of stone, thy sheltering tree,
Thou small prospective ancestress

Of generations yet to be!

IIt
SEA-PICTURES

I

LITHE morning; sun and sea! Zone

beyond zone,
Blue frolic waves and gold clouds softly blown.

One half the globe a sapphire glass which
swings
Doubling the sun.

No sail. No wink of wings.
No haze of land.
Sea-Pictures

Look ! who comes wafted here —
What lone yet all unfearful mariner?
You cannot see him? No; he mocks the
sight —
Mid such immensities so mere a mite.

Look close! That tiniest speck of brownish
red,
Perched on his single subtle spider-thread !

Trust, little aeronaut, thy filmy sail.
Blow wind! the reef and palm-tree shall not
fail.
SEA—PICTURES

II

NORMOUS sea; immeasurable night !
The shoreless waters, heaving spec-
tral-white,
Vibrate with showers and chains of golden
sparks.

The black boat leaves a track of flame.
Beneath

Run trails of blazing emerald, where the sharks

Cross and re-cross. In manya starry wreath

Innumerable medusz shine and float.

Ii4
Sea-Pictures

Great luminaries, through the blue-green air,

Gleam on the face of one who slowly dies.

All through the night two cavernous glazed
eyes

Look blankly upward in a rigid stare.

O Father in heaven, he cannot speak Thy
name ;
Take pity for the sake of Christ, Thy son!

There is no answer, none. No answer, none.

Crossing, re-crossing underneath the boat,
The lean sharks weave their web of emerald
flame.

115
MOONLIGHT

WEET moon, endreaming tower and tree,
Is thy pathetic radiance thrown
From ice-cold wealds and cirques of stone —
Hush’d moors where life has ceased to be?

Did grass, long ages back, and flowers
Grow there? Did living waters rune
Did happy creatures bless the sun

And greet with joy this world of ours?

116
Moonlight

And, earlier yet, in one starred zone,

Did this bright planet sweep through space —
Glebe of our glebe, race of our race —

A part and parcel of our own?

O moonlight silvering tower and tree !

O part of my world torn away,

Part of my life, now lifeless clay,

My dead, shine too — shine down on me!

T17
GREEN PASTURES

HEN springing meads are freshly
dight,
And trees new-leafed throw scarce a
shadow,
The green earth shows no fairer sight
Than soft-eyed kine and blowing meadow.
Too calm for care, too slow for mirth,
Amid the shower, amid the gleam,
The great mild mother-creatures seem
Half-waking forms o’ the dreamy earth.

118
Green Pastures

And down the pathway through the grass
To school the merry children pass,
Singing a rhyme in the April morns,
How — Zhere’s red for the furrows, and
white for the daisies,
Brown eyes for the brooks, for the trees
crumpled horns t

When quivering leaves, and oes of light
Between the leaves, the deep sward dapple,
When may-boughs cream in curdling white,
And maids envy the bloom o’ the apple,
The great mild mother-creatures lie,
And grow, in absence of the sun,
One with the moon and stars, and one
With silvery cloud and darkest sky.

And down the pathway through the grass
To school the merry children pass,
Singing a rhyme in the morns of June,
How — There's white for the cloudlets, and
black for the darkness,
And two polished horns for the sweet sickle
moon.
119g
THE LITTLE DIPPER

ITTLE Dipper, piping sweet
in the shrewd mid-winter weather ;
Nesting in the linn, where spray
splashes nest and sprinkles feather ;

’Neath the fringes of the ice,

down the burn-side, blithely diving ;
Piping, piping with full throat, —

bite the frost or be snow driving :

Life’s white winter comes apace ;
oh, but gaily shall I bide it
If my bosom, like thy nest,
house a singing-bird inside it !

120
IN THE HILLS.

IS hoar breath stings with rime the
skater’s face.
Mirrored in jet, beneath his hissing feet,
The stars swarm past, and radiate as they
fleet,
The immemorial cold of cosmic space.

I2T
NATURE’S MAGIC.

IVE her the wreckage of strife —
Tumulus, tumbled tower,
Each clod and each stone she ’ll make her
own
With the grass and innocent flower.

Give her the Candlemas snow,
Smiling she ’ll take the gift,

And out of the flake a snowdrop make,
And a lambkin out of the drift.

I22
APRIL VOICES.

HE birches of your London square
“ Have leafed into an emerald haze”?
Then come — you promised ; come and share
The fuller spring of our last April days.
The ash, who wastes whole golden weeks in
doubt,
The very ash is long since out ;
The apple-boughs are muffled—do but
think ! —
With crowded bloom of maid’s blush, white
and pink ;
The whins are all ablaze !

123
WwW. Vz.

Picture the pigeons tumbling in bright air !
Fancy the jet-eyed squirrel on the

bough !
Leave the poor birches in your London
square ;
The spring and we await you here, and
now.

Beneath our.old world thatch your pulse
shall beat
To the large-leisured rhythm of wood-
land ease ;
No feverish hurry haunts our otiose
trees ;
Your slumber shall be sweet.

The little brown bird’s nest,

The four blue eggs beneath the patient
breast,

The lambkin’s baby face,

The joy of liquid air

And azure space —

Are these not better than your dingy
square,

124
April Voices

Your mazes of inhospitable stone,
Your crowds who cannot call their souls their
own,
Your Dance of Life-in-death ?
Come to the fields, where Toil draws whole-
some breath,
And Indigence still keeps her apron
white.

Enough that you arrive too late to hear
The migrants in the night !
When wild March winds have dropt, and all
is still,
A spirit-touch unseals the dreaming
eyes ;
One starts, and, leaning from the window-
sill,
Catches the liquid notes, heard fine and
clear
In hushed dark skies.

How pleasant had it been to watch with you,
Day after day,
The fairy flowering of the hawthorn
spray !
125
W. V«.

Each thorn upon the stem
Protects one rose-tipped, green-and-
golden gem ;
A bud, a thorn !—’tis thus the whole tree
through.
No, — where in tender shoots the branches
end
There is no spear!
But bud and bud and bud are crowded
here ;
’T is Nature’s cue
To lavish most what least she can defend.

Come to the woods and see
How in the warm wet sunny mist of morn
Green leaves, like thoughts in dreamful

hours, are born,

And in the mist birds pipe on every tree.
Come, and the mossy boulder on the hill
Shall teach what beauty springs of sitting

still.
The world’s work! Is the life not more
than meat?
And is this shrill immitigable strife,
This agony of existence, life?
126
April Voices

The good earth calls with voices strangely
sweet 5
Come to your mother earth — th’ old English
earth,
The ruddy mother of a mighty race —
Dear ruddy earth, with early wheat
Pale green on plough ridge and with kindly
grass
New sprung in fields that take no care !
Come to the friends who love your
eager face ;
Come share our rustic peace, our frugal
mirth ;
Come, and restrict for once your happy Muse
To the four hundred words we yokels use
For life and love and death —why all the
lore
Of ancient Egypt hardly needed more!
Will London miss her poet? ‘There, alas!
No man is missed. Come make our
roof your own,
And leave the birches dreaming in your
square
Of forests far beyond the maze of stone.

eee
GREEN SKY

REY on the linden leaves ;
Green in the west ;
Under our gloaming eaves
Swifts in the nest ;
Over the mother a human roof;
Over the fledglings a breast.

128
SUB UMBRA CRUCIS
= =
Bina


THE SHEPHERD BEAUTIFUL

FT as I muse on Rome —and at her
name
Out of the darkness, flushed with blood
and gold,
Smoulders and flashes on her seven-
fold height
The imperial, murderous, harlot Rome of
old,
Rome of the lions, Rome of the awful
light
Where “living torches ” flame —
I thread in thought the Catacombs’ blind maze,
Marvelling how men could then draw
happy breath,
And cheer these sunless labyrinths of death
With one sweet dream of Christ told many
ways.

13!
W. V.«.

The Shepherd Beautiful! O good and
sweet,
O Shepherd ever lovely, ever young,
Was it because they gathered at Thy feet,
Because upon Thy pastoral pipe they
hung,
That they were happy in those evil days,
That these grim crypts were arched with
heavenly blue,
And spaced in verdurous vistas lit with
streams ?
Ah, let me count the ways,
Fair Shepherd of the world, in which they
drew
Thee in that most divine of human
dreams.

They limned Thee standing near the wattled
shed,
The strayed sheep on Thy shoulders, and
the flock
Bleating fond welcome. Seasons of the
year —
Spring gathering roses swung athwart the
rock,

132
The Shepherd Beautiful

Summer and Autumn, one with golden
ear,
And one with apple red,
And shrivel’d Winter burning in a heap
Dead leaves —they pictured round
Thee ; for they said,
“ All the year round ’’ — and joyous tears
were shed —
“ All the year round, Thou, Shepherd,
lov’st Thy sheep.”

Sometimes they showed Thee piping in the
shade :
Music so sweet each mouth was raised
from grass
And ceased to hunger. In some dewy glade
Where the cool waters ran as clear as
glass,
To this or that one Thou would’st seem to
say,
“Thou ’st made me glad, be happy thou
in turn!’
And sometimes Thou would’st sit in
weariness —
My Shepherd! “ guaerens me

133
W. V.

Sedisti lassus”»—while Thy dog would
yearn,
Eyes fixed on Thee, aware of Thy
distress.

So limned they Christ; and bold, yet not
too bold,
Smiled at the tyrant’s torch, the lion’s cry ;
So nursed the child-like heart, the
angelic mind,
Goodwill to live, and fortitude to die,
And love for men, and hope for all
mankind.
One Shepherd and one fold !
Such was their craving; none should be
forbid ;.
All —all were Christ’s! And so they drew
once more
The Shepherd Beautiful. But now He bore
No lamb upon His shoulders — just a kid.

134
THE MOSS

HEN black despair beats down my
wings,
And heavenly visions fade away —
Lord, let me bend to common things,
The tasks of every day ;

As, when th’ aurora is denied
And blinding blizzards round him beat,
The Samoyad stoops, and takes for guide
The moss beneath his feet.

135
A CAROL

HIS gospel sang the angels bright :
Lord Jhesu shall be born this night;
Born not in house nor yet in halt,
Wrapped not in purple nor in pall,
Rocked not in silver, netther gold ;
This word the angels sang of old;
LVor christened with white wine nor red;
This word of old the angels said
Of Him which holdeth in His hand
The strong sea and green land.

136
A Carol

This thrice and four times happy night —
These tidings sang the angels bright —
Forlorn, betwixen ear and horn,

A babe shall Jhesu Lord be born,

A weeping babe in all the cold ; —

This word the angels sang of old —

And wisps of hay shall be his bed;

This word of old the angels said

Of Him which keepeth in His hand

The strong sea and green land.

O babe and Lord, Thou Jhesu bright, —
Let all and some now sing this night —
Betwixt our sorrow and our sin,

Be thou new-born our hearts within ;
New-born, dear babe and little King,

So letten some and all men sing —

Zo wipe for us our tears away!

This night so letten all men say

Of Him which spake, and lo! they be —
‘The green land and strong sea.

137
WHEN SNOW LIES DEEP

HEN frost has burned the hedges
black,

And children cannot sleep for cold ;
When snow lies deep on the withered leaves,
And roofs are white from ridge to eaves ;
When bread is dear, and work is slack,

Take pity on the poor and old!

The faggot and the loaf of bread
You could not miss would be their store.
Upon how little the old can live !
Give like the poor — who freely give.
Remember, when the fire burns red
The wolf leaves sniffing at the door.
138
When Snow Lies Deep

And you whose lives are left forlorn,
Whose sons, whose hopes, whose fires have
died,
Oh, you poor pitiful people old,
Remember this and be consoled —
That Christ the Comforter was born,
And still is born, in wintertide.

139
“TREES OF RIGHTEOUSNESS”

HAINED to the dungeon-wall she slept.
Rome, moonlit, revelled overhead.
She heard not. She had prayed and wept,
Haggard with anguish, wild with dread.

She was too fair, too young to die;
Life was too sweet, and home too dear!
God touch’d her with His sleep: a sigh —
And she had ceased to weep or fear !

She slept, and, sleeping, seemed awake :
A fair Child held her virgin hand ;
They walk’d by an enchanted lake ;
They walk’d in a celestial land.
140
“Trees of Righteousness”

One thing she saw, and one shé heard.
There were a thousand red-rose trees ;
Each rose-red leaf sang like a bird,
“What trees, dear Child,” she asked,
“are these?”

“These,” said the Child, “are called Love’s
Bower ;
They fade not ; constantly they sing ;
Each flower appears more fire than flower.
Now, see the roots from which they
spring !””

She looked ; she saw, far down the night,
The earth, the city whence she came,

And Nero’s gardens red with light —

- The light of martyrs wrapped in flame.

She woke with Heaven still in her eyes.
Rome, moonlit, revelled overhead.
She feared no more the lions’ cries ;
Flames were but flowers, and death was
dead !

I4I
THE COMRADES

N solitary rooms, when dusk is falling,
I hear from fields beyond the haunted
mountains,
Beyond the unrepenetrable forests, —
I hear the voices of my comrades calling,
“Home! home! home!”

Strange ghostly voices, when the dusk is
falling,
Come from the ancient years; and I
remember
The schoolboy shout, from plain and
wood and river,
The signal-cry of scattered comrades, calling,
“Home! home! home!”
142
The Comrades

And home we wended when the dusk was
falling ;
The pledged companions, talking, laugh-
ing, singing ;
Home through the grey French country,
no one missing.
And now I hear the old-time voices calling,
“Home! home! home!”

I pause and listen while the dusk is falling ;
My heart leaps back through all the
long estrangement
Of changing faith, lost hopes, paths dis-
enchanted ;
And tears drop as I hear the voices calling,
“Home! home! home!”

I hear you while the dolorous dusk is falling ;
I sigh your names—the living — the
departed !
O vanished comrades, is it yours the
poignant
Pathetic note among the voices calling,
“Home, home, home’?

143
W. V.«.

Call, and still call me, for the dusk is falling.
Call for I fain, I fain would come, but

cannot.
Call, as the shepherd calls upon the
moorland.
Though mute, with beating heart I hear your
calling,

“Home! home! home!”

144
“CRYING ABBA, FATHER”

BBA, in Thine eternal years
Bethink Thee of our fleeting day ;
We are but clay ;
Bear with our foolish joys, our foolish tears,
And all the wilfulness with which we

pray !

I have a little maid who, when she leaves
Her father and her father’s threshold, grieves,
But being gone, and life all holiday,

Forgets my love and me straightway ;

Yet, when I write,

Kisses my letters, dancing with delight,

10 145
W. V.

Cries “ Dearest father! ”’ and in all her glee
For one brief live-long hour remembers me.
Shall I in anger punish or reprove?

Nay, this is natural ; she cannot guess

How one forgotten feels forgetfulness ;

And I am glad thinking of her glad face,
And send her little tokens of my love.

And Thou — wouldst Thou be wroth in such
a caseP

And crying Abba, I am fain
To think no human father’s heart
Can be so tender as Thou art,
So quick to feel our love, to feel our
pain.

When she is froward, querulous or wild,

Thou knowest, Abba, how in each offence

I stint not patience lest I wrong the child,

Mistaking for revolt defect of sense,

For wilfulness mere spriteliness of mind ;

Thou know’st how often, seeing, I am blind;

How when I turn her face against the wall
146
“Crying Abba, Father”

And leave her in disgrace,

And will not look at her or speak at all,

I long to speak and long to see her face ;

And how, when twice, for something grievous
done,

I could but smite, and though I lightly smote,

I felt my heart rise strangling in my throat ;

And whenshe wept I kissed the poor red hands.

All these things, Father, a father understands ;
And am not I Thy son?

Abba, in Thine eternal years
Bethink Thee of our fleeting day ;
From all the rapture of our eyes and ears
How shall we tear ourselves away?
At night my little one says nay,
With prayers implores, entreats with tears
For ten more flying minutes’ play ;
How shall we tear ourselves away?
Yet call, and 1’ll surrender
The flower of soul and sense,
Life’s passion and its splendour,
In quick obedience.
147
W. V.

If not without the blameless human tears

By eyes which slowly glaze and darken shed,
Yet without questionings or fears

For those I leave behind when I am dead.
Thou, Abba, know’st how dear

My little child’s poor playthings are to her ;
What love and joy

She has in every darling doll and precious toy ;
Yet when she stands between my knees

To. kiss good-night, she does not sob in sorrow,
' Oh, father, do not break or injure these !”
She knows that I shall fondly lay them by
For happiness to-morrow ;

So leaves them trustfully. And shall not I?

Whatever darkness gather
O’er coverlet or pall,

Since Thou art Abba, Father,
Why should I fear at all?

Thou ’st seen how closely, Abba, when at rest
My child’s head nestles to my breast ;
148
“Crying Abba, Father”

And how my arm her little form enfolds,
Lest in the darkness she should feel alone ;
And how she holds

My hands, my hands, my two hands in her own?

A little easeful sighing
And restful turning round,
And I too, on Thy love relying,
Shall slumber sound.

149
HIS grace vouchsafe me for the rhymes
I write.
If any last, nor perish quick and quite,
Lord, let them be
My little images, to stand for me
When I may stand no longer in Thy sight:

Like those old statues of the King who said,
‘“‘Carve me in that which needs nor sleep nor
bread ;
Let diorite pray,
A King of stone, for this poor King of clay
Who wearies often and must soon be dead!”

150
PRINTED BY JOHN WILSON AND SON AT
THE UNIVERSITY PRESS IN CAMBRIDGE
DURING JUNE M DCCC XCVI. FOR
STONE AND KIMBALL
NEW YORK

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