Duns and their bills,

Bid we to flee.

Come with the dawn, Blue-devil sprite,

Leave us to-night,

Round the old tree.

CHARLES KINGSLEY 23

THE BAD SQUIRE.

FROM YEAST.'

THE merry brown hares came leaping
Over the crest of the hill,

Where the clover and corn lay sleeping
Under the moonlight still.

Leaping late and early,

Till under their bite and their tread The swedes and the wheat and the barley Lay cankered and trampled and dead.

A poacher's widow sat sighing

On the side of the white chalk bank, Where under the gloomy fir-woods, One spot in the ley throve rank.

She watched a long tuft of clover,

Where rabbit or hare never ran; For its black sour haulm covered over The blood of a murdered man.

She thought of the dark plantation,

And the hares, and her husband's blood,

And the voice of her indignation

Rose up to the throne of God.

'I am long past wailing and whining-
I have wept too much in my life:
I've had twenty years of pining
As an English laborer's wife.

'A laborer in Christian England,

Where they cant of a Saviour's name,

And yet waste men's lives like the vermin's

For a few more brace of game.

There's blood on your new foreign shrubs, squire,
There's blood on your pointer's feet;

There's blood on the game you sell, squire,
And there 's blood on the game you eat.

'You have sold the laboring-man, squire,
Body and soul to shame,

To pay for your seat in the House, squire,
And to pay for the feed of your game.

'You made him a poacher yourself, squire,
When you'd give neither work nor meat,
And your barley-fed hares robbed the garden
At our starving children's feet;

'When, packed in one reeking chamber,
Man, maid, mother, and little ones lay;
While the rain pattered in on the rotten bride-bed,
And the walls let in the day.

'When we lay in the burning fever,
On the mud of the cold clay floor,

Till you parted us all for three months, squire,
At the dreary workhouse door.

'We quarrelled like brutes, and who wonders?
What self-respect could we keep,

Worse housed than your hacks and your pointers, Worse fed than your hogs and your sheep?

'Our daughters, with base-born babies

Have wandered away in their shame,

If your misses had slept, squire, where they did,
Your misses might do the same.

'Can your lady patch hearts that are breaking

With handfuls of coals and rice,

Or by dealing out flannel and sheeting
A little below cost price?

'You may tire of the jail and the workhouse,
And take to allotments and schools,
But you 've run up a debt that will never
Be paid us by penny-club rules.

'In the season of shame and sadness,
In the dark and dreary day,
When scrofula, gout, and madness
Are eating your race away;

'When to kennels and liveried varlets

You have cast your daughter's bread, And, worn out with liquor and harlots, Your heir at your feet lies dead;

'When your youngest, the mealy-mouthed rector, soul rot asleep to the grave,

Lets your
You will find in your God the protector
Of the freeman you fancied your slave.'

She looked at the tuft of clover,

And wept till her heart grew light; And at last, when her passion was over, Went wandering into the night.

But the merry brown hares came leaping
Over the uplands still,

Where the clover and corn lay sleeping

On the side of the white chalk hill.

THE SANDS OF DEE.

FROM 'ALTON LOCKE.'

'O MARY, go and call the cattle home,

And call the cattle home,

And call the cattle home

Across the sands of Dee;'

The western wind was wild and dank with foam,
And all alone went she.

The western tide crept up along the sand,

And o'er and o'er the sand,

And round and round the sand,

As far as eye could see.

The rolling mist came down and hid the land:
And never home came she.

Oh! is it weed, or fish, or floating hair
A tress of golden hair,

A drowned maiden's hair

Above the nets at sea?

Was never salmon yet that shone so fair
Above the stakes on Dee.

They rowed her in across the rolling foam,

The cruel crawling foam,

The cruel hungry foam,

To her grave beside the sea:

But still the boatmen hear her call the cattle home
Across the sands of Dee.

THE THREE FISHERS.

THREE fishers went sailing away to the West,
Away to the West as the sun went down ;

Each thought on the woman who loved him the best,

And the children stood watching them out of the town;