PRESERVED.
A Poet through a haunted wood
Roamed fearless and serene,
Nor flinched when on his path there stood
A Form in Velveteen.
"Gaunt Shape, come you alive or dead,
My footsteps shall not swerve."
"You're trespassing," the Vision said:
"This place is a preserve."
"How so? Is some dark secret here
Preserved? some tale of shame?"
The Spectre scowled, but answered clear:
"What we preserve is Game."
Yet still the Poet's heart was nerved
With Phantoms to dispute:
"Then tell me, why is Game preserved?"
The Goblin yelled: "To shoot."
"But Game that's shot is Game destroyed,
Not Game preserved, I ween."
It seemed such argument annoyed
That Form in Velveteen;
For swift It gripped him, as he spake,
And, making light the load,
Upheaved, and flung him from the brake
Into the King's high-road.
And as that Bard, still arguing hard,
High o'er the palings flew,
He vows he heard this ghostly word:
"We're not preserving you."
Long time he lay on that highway,
Dazed by so weird a fall;
Then rose and cried, as home he hied:
"The Lord preserve us all!"
I have often thought it was an error on the part of the trespassing poet not to explain to his assailant that he was a botanist; for "botanist," as I can testify, is a blessed word which has a soothing effect upon many of the most irascible landowners or their satellites. Personally I never presume to call myself botanist, except when I am found trespassing, on which occasions I have rarely known it to fail. I recall a Saturday afternoon when, as I was rambling in a Derbyshire dale with Bertram Lloyd, and admiring the flowers, we were accosted by the owner in person, who inquired with a sort of suppressed fury whether we knew that we were on his estate. We said we were botanists, and the effect was magical; in less than a minute we were courteously permitted to go where we would and stay as long as we liked.
For botany is regarded as a scientific study; and even sportsmen do not like to incur the reproach of being enemies to science. Their better feelings may be conveyed in a familiar Virgilian line:
Non obtusa adeo gestamus pectora Pœni.[15]