's worth!
Loyalty?--selfishness, cowardice, terror
Stoutly will multiply loyalty's sum,
When to astonish presumption and error
Soon the shout rises--the brigands are come!"

After four stanzas of happily unfulfilled prognostication, the last is--

"Up then and arm! it is wisdom and duty;
We are too tempting a prize to be weak:
Lo, what a pillage of riches and beauty,
Glories to gain and revenges to wreak!
Run for your rifles, and stand to your drilling;
Let not the wolf have his will, as he might,
If in the midst of their trading and tilling
Englishmen cannot--or care not to--fight!"

One only stanza more, the last of another also in 1852.

"Arm then at once! If no one attack us
Better than well, for the rifle may rust;
But if the pirates be coming to sack us,
Level it calmly, and God be your trust!
Only, while yet there's a moment, keep steady;
Skilfully, duteously, quickly prepare,--
Then with a nation of riflemen ready,
Nobody'll come because no one will dare!"

In those days of a generation back, so great was the scare everywhere of
Napoleon's rabid colonels a-coming that I remember my brother Arthur
counselling me to sink our plate down a well for safety; and Mr.
Drummond in a pamphlet exhorted the creation of refuges round the coast
by getting the owners of mansions to fortify them as strongholds,
filling the windows with grates and mattresses, and loopholing
garden-walls for shots at marauders on the roads!

Yet, so sleepy was the British Lion that neither Drummond nor I, nor
even the _Times_, which I invoked, could wake him up for many years: and
the Volunteer movement did not take effect till Louis Napoleon kindly
urged Palmerston to check his rabid colonels by a bold front of
preparation.

I am minded to finish with a mild anecdote which carries its moral. Now,
understand that I never pretended to be a crack shot, though I did make
fair practice through "the Indian twist," the sling supporting one's
arm; if I hit the target occasionally, I was satisfied. But it once
happened (at Teignmouth, where I was a casual visitor) that, seeing a
squad of volunteers practising at a mark on the beach, I went to look
on, and was courteously offered a shot, being not unknown by fame to
some of them. The target was at some 500 yards (say about a third of a
mile), so it was not likely I could hit it, with a chance r