Franks were routed,
When we made Europe bleed?

"This king with a leaden rattle
And death that comes from afar,
What pride hath he of the battle?
What lust to maim or mar?

"The loot and the red blood running
Were the only signs we saw;
But the gods that gave thee cunning
Have also given thee law."

And a Northman spake: "With seven
Fair churches when I died
I had paved my path to heaven;
Their pillage was my pride.

"I tore the saints from their niches
With the red hands of my rage;"
But what hast thou in thy ditches
To do with a craftless age?

"Thou hast felt no Viking's starkness;
Thou hast lost a Christian's throne."
And they drove him forth in the darkness
To find a place of his own.

EVOE.

* * * * *

THE SILENCE OF WAR.

I have a confession to make. Once in the happy far-off days--it seems
ages since--I was bored by my fellow-passengers' conversation in the
train. I daresay that they were equally bored by mine; but against that
view there is the fact that this is my confession and not theirs. Well,
I am punished now. I admit that I would give a good deal to hear
Griffith's story of how he did the dog-leg hole in three again. There
sits Griffith opposite to me, and no one would know that he had ever
handled a club. He has become a golf-mute.

Or think of Purvis. The recital of the performances of Purvis's new car
lent an additional terror to railway travelling. I have forgotten the
very make of his car now. I cannot particularise the number of its
cylinders or say if it is electrically started. Purvis is
conversationally punctured.

There was, too, one recalls, an Insurance Act. Wilson felt a special
grievance because he employed an aged gardener, out of charity, two days
a week. He talked, if I remember correctly, about a cruel fourpence and
a mythical ninepence. He read fierce letters he had composed for the
Press, and when the papers published them, which was seldom, he read
them to us all over again. As an anti-insurance agitator Wilson now
comes under the unemployment section of the accursed Act.

And the strange people who intruded with third-class tickets, and
trampled on our toes, and smoked shag, and talked repulsively about the
Cockspurs and Chelsea's new purchase from Oldham Athletic, and gave each
other "dead certs" of appalling incertitude, and passed remarks which to
my mind showe