,
The rare and vital magic of the main,
The which for all their care
They never shall ensnare--
All this
Perchance in dreams they know;
Yet are content
And count the night well spent
If so
The indrawn net contain
The matter of their daily nourishment.

The unseizable sea,
The circumambient grace of Deity,
Where live and move
Unnumbered presences of power and love,
Slips through our finest net:
We draw it up all wet,
A-shimmer with the dew-drops of that deep.
And yet
For all their toil the fishers may not keep
The instant living freshness of the wave;
Its passing benediction cannot give
The mystic meat they crave
That they may live.

But on some stormy night
We, venturing far from home,
And casting our poor trammel to the tide,
Perhaps shall feel it come
Back to the vessel's side,
So easy and so light
A child might lift,
Yet hiding in its mesh the one desired gift;
That living food
Which man for ever seeks to snatch from out the flood.

MRS MARGARET L. WOODS

SONGS

I've heard, I've heard
The long low note of a bird,
The nightingale fluting her heart's one word.

I know, I know
Pink carnations heaped with snow.
Summer and winter alike they blow.

I've lain, I've lain
Under roses' delicate rain,
That fall and whisper and fall again.

Come woe, come white
Shroud o' the world, black night!
I have had love and the sun's light.

THE CHANGELING

When did the Changeling enter in?
How did the Devil set him a gin
Where the little soul lay like a rabbit
Faint and still for a fiend to grab it?
I know not.

Where was the fount of our dishonour?
Was it a father's buried sin?
Brought his mother a curse upon her?
I trow not.

So pretty
Body and soul, the child began.
He carolled and kissed and laughed and ran,
A glad creature of Earth and Heaven,
And the knowledge of love and the secret of pity,
That need our learning,
God to him at his birth had given.

One remembers
Trifles indeed--the backward-turning
Way he would smile from the field at play.
Sometimes the Thing that sits by the embers
Smiles at me--devil!--the selfsame way.
If only early enough one had guessed,
Known, suspected, watched him at rest,
Noted the Master's sign and fashion,
And u