the river. You alone have
eyes for the passing of greatness, and a heart to feel it.

"There's a far bell ringing,"

But you alone hear it tolling to evensong, to the close of day, the end of
deeds.

So, as we near the beach where she is to lie, a sense of proud
exclusiveness mingles with our high regret. Astern the jettymen and
stevedores are wrangling over their latest job; trains are shunting,
cranes working, trucks discharging their cargoes amid clouds of dust.
We and we only assist at the passing of a goddess. Euergetes rests on his
oars, the tow-rope slackens, she glides into the deep shadow of the shore,
and with a soft grating noise--ah, the eloquence of it!--takes ground.
Silently we carry her chain out and noose it about a monster elm; silently
we slip the legs under her channels, lift and make fast her stern
moorings, lash the tiller for the last time, tie the coverings over
cabintop and well; anxiously, with closed lips, praetermitting no due
rite. An hour, perhaps, passes, and November darkness has settled on the
river ere we push off our boat, in a last farewell committing her--our
treasure 'locked up, not lost'--to a winter over which Jove shall reign
genially.

"Et fratres Helenae, lucida sidera."

As we thread our dim way homeward among the riding-lights flickering on
the black water, the last pale vision of her alone and lightless follows
and reminds me of the dull winter ahead, the short days, the long nights.
She is haunting me yet as I land on the wet slip strewn with dead leaves
to the tide's edge. She follows me up the hill, and even to my library
door. I throw it open, and lo! a bright fire burning, and, smiling over
against the blaze of it, cheerful, companionable, my books have been
awaiting me.

[1] The discarded opening stanza ran:--

"Though you should build a bark of dead men's bones,
And rear a phantom gibbet for a mast,
Stitch shrouds together for a sail, with groans
To fill it out blood-stained and aghast;
Although your rudder be a dragon's tail
Long-sever'd, yet still hard with agony,
Your cordage large uprootings from the skull
Of bald Medusa, certes you would fail
To find the Melancholy--whether she
Dreameth in any isle of Lethe dull."

NOVEMBER.

Will the reader forgive, this month, a somewhat more serious gossip?

In my childhood I used to spend long holidays with my grandparents in