Vagabond and Other Poems from Punch | Page 9

gay and innocent of guile,

The little pansies nod their heads and smile.
With what a whispering and a lulling sound
They watch the children
sport about the ground,
Longing, it seems, to join the pretty play

That laughs and runs the light-winged hours away.
And other children long ago there were
Who shone and played and
made the garden fair,
To whom the pansies in their robes of white

And gold and purple gave a welcome bright.
Gone are those voices, but the others came.
Joyous and free, whose
spirit was the same;
And other pansies, robed as those of old,

Peeped up and smiled in purple, white and gold.
For pansies are, I think, the little gleams
Of children's visions from a
world of dreams,
Jewels of innocence and joy and mirth,
Alight
with laughter as they fall to earth.
Below, the ancient guardian, it may hap,
The kindly mother, takes
them in her lap,
Decks them with glowing petals and replaces
In the
glad air the friendly pansy-faces.
So tread not rashly, children, lest you crush
A part of childhood in a
thoughtless rush.
Would you not treat them gently if you knew

Pansies are little bits of children too?
THE DRAGON OF WINTER HILL

I
This is the tale the old men tell, the tale that was told to me,
Of the blue-green dragon,
The dreadful dragon,
The dragon who
flew so free,
The last of his horrible scaly race
Who settled and
made his nesting place
Some hundreds of thousands of years ago.

One day, as the light was falling low
And the turbulent wind was still,

In a stony hollow,
Where none dared follow,
Beyond the ridge
on the gorse-clad summit, the summit of Winter Hill!
The news went round in the camp that night;
it was Dickon who
brought it first
How the wonderful dragon,
The fiery dragon,
On
his terrified eyes had burst.
"I was out," he said, "for a fat young buck,
But never a touch I had of
luck;
And still I wandered and wandered on
Till all the best of the
day was gone;
When, suddenly, lo, in a flash of flame
Full over the
ridge a green head came,
A green head flapped with a snarling lip,

And a long tongue set with an arrow's tip.
I own I didn't stand long at
bay,
But I cast my arrows and bow away,
And I cast my coat, and I
changed my plan,
And forgot the buck, and away I ran--
And, oh,
but my heart was chill:
For still as I ran I heard the bellow
Of the
terrible slaughtering fierce-eyed fellow
Who has made his lair on the
gorse-clad summit,
the summit of Winter Hill."
Then the women talked, as the women will, and the men-folk they
talked too Of the raging dragon,
The hungry dragon,
The dragon of
green and blue.
And the Bards with their long beards flowing down,

They sat apart and were seen to frown.
But at last the Chief Bard up and spoke,
"Now I swear by beech and I
swear by oak,
By the grass and the streams I swear," said he,
"This

dragon of Dickon's puzzles me.
For the record stands, as well ye
know,
How a hundred years and a year ago
We dealt the dragons a
smashing blow
By issuing from our magic tree
A carefully-framed
complete decree,
Which ordered dragons to cease to be.
Still, since
our Dickon is passing sure
That he saw a regular Simon pure.
Some
dragon's egg, as it seems, contrived
To elude our curses, and so
survived
On an inaccessible rocky shelf,
Where at last it managed
to hatch itself.
Whatever the cause, the result is plain:
We're in for a
dragon-fuss again.
We haven't the time, and, what is worse,
We
haven't the means to frame a curse.
So what is there left for us to say

Save this, that our men at break of day
Must gather and go to kill

The monstrous savage
Whose fire-blasts ravage
The flocks and
herds on the gorse-clad summit,
the summit of Winter Hill?"
II
So the men, when they heard the Chief Bard utter the order that bade
them
try
For the awful dragon,
The dauntless dragon,
They all of them
shouted "Aye!"
For everyone felt assured that he,
Whatever the fate
of the rest might be,
However few of them might survive,
Was
certainly safe to stay alive,
And was probably bound to deal the blow

That would shatter the beast and lay him low,
And end the days of
their dragon-foe.
And all the women-folk egged them on:
It was
"Up with your heart, and at him, John!"
Or "Gurth, you'll bring me
his ugly head,"
Or "Lance, my man, when you've struck him dead,

When he hasn't a wag in his fearful tail,
Carve off and bring me a
blue-green scale."
Then they set to work at their swords and spears--

Such a polishing
hadn't been seen for years.
They made the tips of their arrows sharp,

Re-strung and burnished the Chief Bard's harp,
Dragged out the

traditional dragon-bag,
Sewed up the rents in the tribal flag;
And all
in the midst of the talk and racket
Each wife was making her man a
packet--
A hunch of bread and a wedge of cheese
And a nubble of
beef, and, to moisten these,
A flask of