low go?"
He asked in sheer derision.

In short, it soon occurred to me
This kid of six or seven,
Who wouldn't learn his A B C,
Was hardly ripe for heaven.

He never lost his appetite--
He bigger grew, and bigger;
And proved, with every inch of height,
A nigger is a nigger.

And, looking from this moment back,
I have a strong persuasion
That, after all, a finished black
Is not the "clean"--Caucasian.

Dear Peter from my threshold went,
One morning in the body:
He "dropped" me, to oblige a gent--
A gent with spear and waddy!

He shelved me for a boomerang--
We never had a quarrel;
And, if a moral here doth hang,
Why let it hang--the moral!

My mournful tale its course has run--
My Pete, when last I spied him,
Was eating 'possum underdone:
He had his gin beside him.

Narrara Creek

(Written in the shadow of 1872.)

From the rainy hill-heads, where, in starts and in spasms,
Leaps wild the white torrent from chasms to chasms--
From the home of bold echoes, whose voices of wonder
Fly out of blind caverns struck black by high thunder--
Through gorges august, in whose nether recesses
Is heard the far psalm of unseen wildernesses--
Like a dominant spirit, a strong-handed sharer
Of spoil with the tempest, comes down the Narrara.

Yea, where the great sword of the hurricane cleaveth
The forested fells that the dark never leaveth--
By fierce-featured crags, in whose evil abysses
The clammy snake coils, and the flat adder hisses--
Past lordly rock temples, where Silence is riven
By the anthems supreme of the four winds of heaven--
It speeds, with the cry of the streams of the fountains
It chained to its sides, and dragged down from the mountains!

But when it goes forth from the slopes with a sally--
Being strengthened with tribute from many a valley--
It broadens and brightens, and thereupon marches
Above the stream sapphires and under green arches,
With the rhythm of majesty--careless of cumber--
Its might in repose and its fierceness in slumber--
Till it beams on the plains, where the wind is a bearer
Of words from the sea to the stately Narrara!

Narrara! grand son of the haughty hill torrent,
Too late in my day have I looked at thy current--
Too late in my life to discern and inherit
The soul of thy beauty, the joy o