Gladly rose the land to bid them
Welcome for a fleeting spell--
Nobly took them in and did them--
And has done extremely well.

Peace be theirs, important Packet,
Genial skies and happy calms--
No derogatory racket,
No humiliating qualms!
Gales, I charge you, shun to rouse and
Lash the seas to angry foam,
While Britannia's Great Ten Thousand
Sweep, with huge enjoyment, home!

Let the spiced and salty zephyr
Build them up in frame and mind,
Till they feel as fresh and effer-
vescent as their hearts are kind,
And in triumph close their Indian
Tour on far Massilia's quay,
Never having known too windy an
Offing, too disturbed a sea.

So, when English snows are falling,
When the fogs are growing dense,
They shall hear the East a-calling,
And shall come, and blow expense.
Every year shall bring his Argo;
Every year a grateful East
Shall receive her golden Cargo,
And restore the Gilded--Fleeced!

A SOLDIER OF WEIGHT

In the dim and distant ages, in the half-forgotten days,
Ere the East became the fashion and an Indian tour the craze,
Lived a certain Major-General, renowned throughout the State
As a soldier of distinction and considerable weight.

But though weightiness of mind is an invaluable trait,
When applied to adiposity it's all the other way;
And our hero was confronted with an ever-growing lack
Of the necessary charger and the hygienic hack.

He had bought them by the dozen, he had tried them by the score,
But not one of them was equal to the burden that he bore;
They were conscious of the honour, they were sound in wind and limb,
They could carry a cathedral, but they drew the line at _him_.

But he stuck to it, till finally his pressing needs were filled
By the mammoth of his species, a Leviathan in build,
A superb upstanding brown, of unexceptionable bone,
And phenomenally qualified to carry twenty stone.

And the General was happy; for the noble creature showed
An unruffled acquiescence with the nature of his load;
Till without the slightest warning, that superb upstanding brown
Thought it time to make a protest, which he did by lying down.

They appealed to him, reproached him, gave him sugar, cut his feed,
But in vain; for almost daily that inexorable steed