red winter dawn;
I awoke on the plain; the wind was gone;--

All gracious and good as when God made
The living creatures, and none was afraid.

I stooped to drink of the wholesome spring
Under the poplars whispering:

Face to my face in that water clear--
The Kelpie rider's jabbering leer!

Ah, God! not me: I was never so!
Sainted Louis, who can know

The lords of life from the slaves of death?
What help avail the speeding breath

Of the spirit that knows not self's abode,--
When the soul is lost that knows not God?

I turned me home by St. Louis' Hall,
Where the red sun burns on the windows tall.

And I thought the world was strange and wild,
And God with his altar only a child.

IV

Again one year in the prime of June,
I came to the well in the heated noon,

Leaving Rochelle with its red roof tiles
By the Pottery Gate before St. Giles,--

There where the flower market is,
Where every morning up from Duprisse

The flower girls come by the long white lane
That skirts the edge of Bareau plain;--

To the North, the city wall in the sun,
To the left, the fen where the eye may run

And have its will of the blazing blue.
The while I loitered the market through,

Halting a moment to converse
With old Babette who had been my nurse,

There passed through the stalls a woman, bright
With a kirtle of cinnabar and white

Among the kerseys blue; and I said,
"Who is it, Babette, with lifted head,

"And the startled look, possessed and strange,
Under the paint--secure from change?"

"Ah, 'Sieur Jean, do ye not ken
Of the eerie folk of Bareau Fen?"

I blenched, and she knew too well I wist
The fearsome fate of the goblin tryst.

"The street is a cruel home, 'Sieur Jean,
But a weird uncanny drives her on.

"'Tis a bitter tale for Christian folk,
How once she dreamed, and how she woke."

"Ay, ay!" I passed and reached the spring
Where the poplars kept their whispering,

Hid for an hour in the shade,
In the rank marsh grass of a tiny glade.

There crossed the moor from the town afar,
In kirtle of white and cinnabar,

A wanderer on that plain of tears,
Bowed with a burden not of the years,

As one that goeth sorrowing
For many an unforgotten thing.

To the crystal well as