_

"Master, it was long ago you bought me;
Master, you were proud to see me strain,
Matching all my might as nature taught me
With the loaded burden of the wain.
When I drew the harvest waggon single--
'_Good lad!_'--how I turned my head to see!
Chain and hames and brasses all a-jingle,
Long ago--do you remember me?"

_Pitiless surge and driving hail,
A ship a-roll in a dazing roar,
A shoulder split on an iron rail,
And a hobble to death on the further shore._

"Master, you were saddened when we parted,
Begged of my new master to be kind;
Divers owners since and divers-hearted
Leave me old and weary, lame and blind.
Voices in the tempest passing over--
'_Good lass!_'--I can scarcely turn my head.
Oats and deep-strewn stall and rack of clover,
Long ago--and oh that I were dead!"

_Piteous fate--too long to live,
Piteous end for a friend of yore;
Was it too much of a boon to give
A merciful death on the nearer shore?_

* * * * *

THE NEW "WHITE HOPE."

"'I passed through several drawing-rooms,' she says. 'I saw
ladies who were so shy that they couldn't utter a word before
me, but who suddenly put a ribbon round my wrist to measure
it'--you know, of course, by reputation Polaire's 15-inch
wrist."--_Sunday Chronicle._

If the biceps is in proportion, Bandsman BLAKE should tremble.

* * * * *

AT THE PLAY.

"The Darling of the Gods."

Though the Gallery, on the night when I attended, received it with rapt
interest rather than delirious enthusiasm, _The Darling of the Gods_
promises once more to justify its title. The play has undergone very
little modification since it was produced a decade ago. It remains pure
melodrama incidentally set in a Japanese dress, and sprinkled with a few
Japanese words. Here and there it may reproduce the Japanese attitude of
mind, as distinct from details of custom, but the general spirit of it
follows the traditional Anglo-Saxon lines. Anybody who knows no more of
Japan than may be gathered from the pages of LAFCADIO HEARN will at
least have learned that her youth is taught to regard the love-interest
of an ordinary English novel as an indecency; and so will recognise the
improbability of the romantic element in the play. Still, all that is of
little consequ