taxed and gauged,
Then stored in bond to ripen, mellow, age.
God bless the Army, rank and file who fight our souls to save!
Modern disciples of the Son of Man, true followers of Christ,
They work by day, then preach and pray and pound their drum at night.

L'ENVOY.

Farewell, this ends my rhyming, submitted at its worth.
Lest I forget--pride goes before the fall, on earth
And exceeding fine if slowly, grind the mills of angry gods--
The muses' steed, a versifying bronco had I caught
And recklessly I rode; but fast as thought
Fate overtook me when Pegasus bucked me off.
Sorely distressed I hear a satyr's mocking laugh
As on my laurels resting, on my seat of honor cast
And thanking you for kind attention now your indulgent censure ask.

THE BIRTH OF ARIZONA. (AN ALLEGORICAL TALE.)

On the summit of a mountain I staked my claim; in the shade of a
balsam-spruce I built my hut.

When the south wind that rises on the desert climbs to the mountain's
ridge and rustling among silvery needles, rattles the cones on boughs
and twigs--the tree-giant whispers with resinous breath, bemoaning the
fate of a prehistoric civilization, and lisps of the mystery and
romance of a humanity long extinct, mourning for races forgotten and
vanished.

Alone--unrivaled in her weird, wild grandeur stands Arizona where spiry
rock-ribbed giants stab an emerald, opal-tinted sky, and terraced mesas
of wondrous amber hue form natural stairways, that grandly wrought were
carved step after step, through successive epochs of erosion, affording
thus an easy ascent to the rugged profile of this land of the Western
Hemisphere. All this is of historic record in stony cypher of geology
indelibly engraved by time on the rocky walls of deepest canyons, as
traceable from the primordial archaean to our present era, the age of
man.

In tremor-spasms of terrestrial creation, 'midst chaotic fiery turmoil
of volcanos, out of the depth of globe-encircling waters, from the womb
of Universe--Eternity--came the Almighty Word, and then was born fair
Arizona.

Fraught with golden prophecy was her horoscope, cast by fate's oracle
for her birthday fell under the sign of the scorpion when in the path
of planets Venus contended with the Earth for first place of ascendency
to the second house of the heavens.

High above the tidal wave rose Arizona, as fleecy clouds float in the
rays of Apollo's sun-torch when at eventide his flaming