my neck your white arm."
She smiled, and she laid her white arm round his neck.
"Yet once more I would blow, and the music divine
Would bring me a third time an exquisite bliss
You would lay your fair cheek to this brown one of mine
And your lips, stealing past it, would give me a kiss."

The maiden laughed out in her innocent glee--
"What a fool of yourself with the whistle you'd make!
For only consider how silly 'twould be
To sit there and whistle for what you might take."

_Unknown._

THE CLOUD

AN IDYLL OF THE WESTERN FRONT

I

|Scene|: _A wayside shrine in France._

|Persons|: Celeste, Pierre, a Cloud.

|Celeste| (_gazing at the solitary white Cloud_):
I wonder what your thoughts are, little Cloud,
Up in the sky, so lonely and so proud!

|Cloud|: Not proud, dear maiden; lonely, if you will.
Long have I watched you, sitting there so still
Before that little shrine beside the way,
And wondered where your thoughts might be astray;
Your knitting lying idle on your knees,
And worse than idle--like Penelope's,
Working its own undoing!

|Celeste| (_picks up her knitting_): Who was she?
Saints! What a knot!--Who was Penelope?
What happened to _her_ knitting? Tell me, Cloud!

|Cloud|: She was a Queen; she wove her husband's shroud.

|Celeste| (_drops the knitting_).
His shroud!

|Cloud|: There, there! 'Twas only an excuse
To put her lovers off, a wifely ruse,
Bidding them bide till it was finished, she
Each night the web unravelled secretly.

|Celeste|: He came home safe?
|Cloud|: If I remember right,
It was the lovers needed shrouds that night!
It is an old, old tale. I heard it through
A Wind whose ancestor it was that blew
Ulysses' ship across the purple sea
Back to his people and Penelope.
We Clouds pick up strange tales, as far and wide
And to and fro above the world we ride,
Across uncharted seas, upon the swell
Of viewless waves and tides invisible,
Freighted with friendly flood or forked flame,
Knowing not whither bound nor whence we came;
Now drifting lonely, now a company
Of pond'rous galleons--

|Celeste|: Oft-times I see
A Cloud, as by some playful fancy stirred,
Take likeness of a monstrous beast or bird
Or some fantastic fish, as though 'twere clay
Moulded by unseen hands