A damsel, as our train stops at Five Ashes, Down to the station in a dog-cart dashes. A footman buys her ticket, "Third class, parly; And, in huge-button'd coat and "Champagne Charley"

And such scant manhood else as use allows her,

Her two shy knees bound in a single trouser, With, 'twixt her shapely lips, a violet Perch'd as a proxy for a cigarette,

She takes her window in our smoking carriage,

And scans us, calmly scorning men and marriage.

Ben frowns in silence; older, I know better

Than to read ladies 'havior in the letter. This aping man is crafty Love's devising To make the woman's difference more surprising;

And, as for feeling wroth at such rebelling, Who'd scold the child for now and then

And smiles, forbidden her lips, as weakness horrid,

Broke, in grave lights, from eyes and chin and forehead ;

And, as I push'd kind 'vantage 'gainst the

scorner,

The two shy knees press'd shyer to the cor

ner;

And Ben began to talk with her, the rather Because he found out that he knew her father,

Sir Francis Applegarth, of Fenny Compton, And danced once with her sister Maude at Brompton ;

And then he star'd until he quite confus'd her,

More pleas'd with her than I, who but excus'd her;

And, when she got out, he, with sheepish glances,

Said he'd stop too, and call on old Sir Francis.

FROM "THE UNKNOWN EROS"

THE TOYS

My little son, who look'd from thoughtful eyes

And mov'd and spoke in quiet grown-up wise,

Having my law the seventh time disobey'd,
I struck him, and dismiss'd
With hard words and unkiss'd,

His Mother, who was patient, being dead. Then, fearing lest his grief should hinder sleep,

I visited his bed,

But found him slumbering deep,

With darken'd eyelids, and their lashes yet From his late sobbing wet.

And I, with moan,

Kissing away his tears, left others of my

own;

For, on a table drawn beside his head,
He had put, within his reach,

A box of counters and a red-vein'd stone,
A piece of glass abraded by the beach,
And six or seven shells,

A bottle with bluebells

And two French copper coins, ranged there with careful art,

To comfort his sad heart.
So when that night I pray'd
To God, I wept, and said:

SAY, did his sisters wonder what could
Joseph see

In a mild, silent little Maid like thee?
And was it awful, in that narrow house,
With God for Babe and Spouse?
Nay, like thy simple, female sort, each one
Apt to find Him in Husband and in Son,
Nothing to thee came strange in this.
Thy wonder was but wondrous bliss:
Wondrous, for, though

True Virgin lives not but does know,
(Howbeit none ever yet confess'd,)
That God lies really in her breast,
Of thine He made His special nest!
And so

All mothers worship little feet,
And kiss the very ground they 've trod;
But, ah, thy little Baby sweet
Who was indeed thy God!

Beside her, on a table round, inlaid
With precious stones by Roman art de-
sign'd,

Lay phials, scent, a novel and a Bible,
A pill box, and a wine glass, and a book
On the Apocalypse; for she was much
Addicted unto physic and religion,
And her physician had prescrib'd for her
Jellies and wines and cheerful Literature.
The Book on the Apocalypse was writ
By her chosen pastor, and she took the
novel

With the dry sherry, and the pills prescrib'd.

A gorgeous, pious, comfortable life
Of misery she lived; and all the sins

Of all her house, and all the nation's sins,
And all shortcomings of the Church and
State,

And all the sins of all the world beside, Bore as her special cross, confessing them Vicariously day by day, and then

She comforted her heart, which needed it, With bric-a-brac and jelly and old wine.

Beside the fire, her elbow on the mantel, And forehead resting on her finger-tips, Shading a face where sometimes loom'd a frown,

And sometimes flash'd a gleam of bitter

It was not noble, and despise it all,
And most herself for making it her all.
A woman, complex, intricate, involv'd ;
Wrestling with self, yet still by self sub-
dued;

Scorning herself for being what she was,
And yet unable to be that she would;
Uneasy with the sense of possible good
Never attain'd, nor sought, except in fits
Ending in failures; conscious, too, of power
Which found no purpose to direct its force,
And so came back upon herself, and grew
An inward fret. The caged bird some-
times dash'd

Against the wires, and sometimes sat and pin'd,

But mainly peck'd her sugar, and eyed her glass,

And trill'd her graver thoughts away in

song.

Mother and daughter-yet a childless mother,

And motherless her daughter; for the world

Had gash'd a chasm between, impassable, And they had nought in common, neither love,

Nor hate, nor anything except a name. Yet both were of the world; and she not least

Whose world was the religious one, and stretch'd

A kind of isthmus 'tween the Devil and God,

A slimy, oozy mud, where mandrakes grew, Ghastly, with intertwisted roots, and things Amphibious haunted, and the leathern bat Flicker'd about its twilight evermore.

THE SELF-EXILED

THERE came a soul to the gate of Heaven
Gliding slow

A soul that was ransom'd and forgiven,
And white as snow :
And the angels all were silent.

A mystic light beam'd from the face
Of the radiant maid,
But there also lay on its tender grace
A mystic shade :

And the angels all were silent.