No More Learning

Chorus of the Crystallised Facts

Before the beginning of years
There came to the rule of the State
Men with a pair of shears,
Men with an Estimate--
Strachey with Muir for leaven,
Lytton with locks that fell,
Ripon fooling with Heaven,
And Temple riding like H--ll!
And the bigots took in hand
Cess and the falling of rain,
And the measure of sifted sand
The dealer puts in the grain--
Imports by land and sea,
To uttermost decimal worth,
And registration--free--
In the houses of death and of birth.

And fashioned with pens and paper,
And fashioned in black and white,
With Life for a flickering taper
And Death for a blazing light--
With the Armed and the Civil Power,
That his strength might endure for a span--
From Adam's Bridge to Peshawur,
The Much Administered Man.

In the towns of the North and the East,
They gathered as unto rule,
They bade him starve his priest
And send his children to school.

Railways and roads they wrought,
For the needs of the soil within;
A time to squabble in court,
A time to bear and to grin.

And gave him peace in his ways,
Jails--and Police to fight,
Justice--at length of days,
And Right--and Might in the Right.

His speech is of mortgaged bedding,
On his kine he borrows yet,
At his heart is his daughter's wedding,
In his eye foreknowledge of debt.

He eats and hath indigestion,
He toils and he may not stop;
His life is a long-drawn question
Between a crop and a crop.




THE MARE'S NEST

Jane Austen Beecher Stowe de Rouse
Was good beyond all earthly need;
But, on the other hand, her spouse
Was very, very bad indeed.

He smoked cigars, called churches slow,
And raced--but this she did not know.

For Belial Machiavelli kept
The little fact a secret, and,
Though o'er his minor sins she wept,
Jane Austen did not understand
That Lilly--thirteen-two and bay
Absorbed one-half her husband's pay.

She was so good, she made him worse;
(Some women are like this, I think;)
He taught her parrot how to curse,
Her Assam monkey how to drink.

He vexed her righteous soul until
She went up, and he went down hill.

Then came the crisis, strange to say,
Which turned a good wife to a better.

A telegraphic peon, one day,
Brought her--now, had it been a letter
For Belial Machiavelli, I
Know Jane would just have let it lie.
But 'twas a telegram instead,
Marked "urgent," and her duty plain
To open it. Jane Austen read:
"Your Lilly's got a cough again.
Can't understand why she is kept
At your expense. " Jane Austen wept.

It was a misdirected wire.
Her husband was at Shaitanpore.
She spread her anger, hot as fire,
Through six thin foreign sheets or more.

Sent off that letter, wrote another
To her solicitor--and mother.

Then Belial Machiavelli saw
Her error and, I trust, his own,
Wired to the minion of the Law,
And traveled wifeward--not alone.

For Lilly--thirteen-two and bay--
Came in a horse-box all the way.

There was a scene--a weep or two--
With many kisses. Austen Jane
Rode Lilly all the season through,
And never opened wires again.

She races now with Belial. This
Is very sad, but so it is.




POSSIBILITIES

Ay, lay him 'neath the Simla pine--
A fortnight fully to be missed,
Behold, we lose our fourth at whist,
A chair is vacant where we dine.

His place forgets him; other men
Have bought his ponies, guns, and traps.