Phrase Exercise.
1. Lonely mood.—2. His heart was beginning to sink.—3. Low despair.—4. Silken clew.—5. Ceiling dome.—6. Bruce could not divine.—7. Strong endeavor.—8. Slipping sprawl.—9. Bruce braced his mind.—10. Con over this strain.
XXIII.—THE FARMER AND THE FOX.
J. A. Froude.
A Farmer, whose poultry-yard had suffered severely from the foxes, succeeded at last in catching one in a trap.
“Ah, you rascal!” said he, as he saw him struggling, “I’ll teach you to steal my fat geese. You shall hang on the tree yonder, and your brothers shall see what comes of thieving.”
The Farmer was twisting a halter to do what he had threatened, when the Fox, whose tongue had helped him in hard pinches before, thought there could be no harm in trying if it might not do him one more good turn.
“You will hang me,” he said, “to frighten my brother foxes. On the word of a fox they won’t care a rabbit-skin for it; they’ll come and look at me, but you may depend upon it, they will dine at your expense before they go home again!”
“Then I shall hang you for yourself, as a rogue and a rascal,” said the Farmer.
“I am only what Nature, or whatever you call the thing, chose to make me,” the Fox answered; “I didn’t make myself.”
“You stole my geese,” said the man.
“Why did Nature make me like geese, then?” said the Fox. “Live and let live; give me my share and I won’t touch yours; but you keep them all to yourself.”
“I don’t understand your fine talk,” answered the Farmer; “but I know that you are a thief, and that you deserve to be hanged.”
His head is too thick to let me catch him so, thought the Fox; I wonder if his heart is any softer. “You are taking away the life of a fellow-creature,” he said; “that’s a responsibility,—it is a curious thing that life, and who knows what comes after it? You say I am a rogue; I say I am not; but at any rate I ought not to be hanged, for if I am not, I don’t deserve it; and if I am, you should give me time to repent.” I have him now, thought the Fox; let him get out if he can.
“Why, what would you have me do with you?” said the man.
“My notion is, that you should let me go, and give me a lamb, or a goose or two, every month, and then I could live without stealing; but perhaps you know better than I, and I am a rogue; my education may have been neglected; you should shut me up, and take care of me, and teach me. Who knows but in the end I may turn into a dog?”
“Very pretty,” said the Farmer; “we have dogs enough, and more, too, than we can take care of, without you. No, no, Master Fox; I have caught you, and you shall swing, whatever is the logic of it. There will be one rogue less in the world, any how.”
“It is mere hate and unchristian vengeance,” said the Fox.
“No, friend,” the Farmer answered, “I don’t hate you, and I don’t want to revenge myself on you; but you and I can’t get on together, and I think I am of more importance than you. If nettles and thistles grow in my cabbage-garden, I don’t try and persuade them to grow into cabbages. I just dig them up. I don’t hate them; but I feel somehow that they mustn’t hinder me with my cabbage, and that I must put them away; and so, my poor friend, I am sorry for you, but I am afraid you must swing.”
XXIV.—A CANADIAN BOAT SONG.
Thomas Moore.
[Written on the river Ottawa in the summer of 1804.]
Faintly as tolls the evening chime,
Our voices keep tune and our oars keep time;
Soon as the woods on the shore look dim,
We’ll sing at St. Anne’s our parting hymn.
Row, brothers, row, the stream runs fast,
The Rapids are near, and the daylight’s past.
Why should we yet our sail unfurl?
There is not a breath the blue wave to curl;
But when the wind blows off the shore,
O sweetly we’ll rest our weary oar.
Blow, breezes, blow, the stream runs fast,
The Rapids are near, and the daylight’s past.
Utaw’a’s tide! this trembling moon
Shall see us float over thy surges soon.
Saint of this green isle! hear our prayers;
O grant us cool heavens, and favoring airs.
Blow, breezes, blow, the stream runs fast,
The Rapids are near, and the daylight’s past.
XXV.—THE WRECK OF THE HESPERUS.
Longfellow.
It was the schooner Hesperus,
That sailed the wintry sea;
And the skipper had taken his little daughter,
To bear him company.
Blue were her eyes as the fairy flax,
Her cheeks like the dawn of day,
And her bosom white as the hawthorn buds,
That ope in the month of May.
The skipper he stood beside the helm,
His pipe was in his mouth,
And he watched how the veering flaw did blow
The smoke now west, now south.
Then up and spake an old sailor,
Had sailed the Spanish Main,
“I pray thee put into yonder port.
For I fear a hurricane.
“Last night the moon had a golden ring,
And to-night no moon we see!”
The skipper he blew a whiff from his pipe,
And a scornful laugh laughed he.
Colder and louder blew the wind,
A gale from the north-east;
The snow fell hissing in the brine,
And the billows frothed like yeast.
Down came the storm, and smote amain
The vessel in its strength;
She shuddered and paused, like a frighted steed,
Then leaped her cable’s length.
“Come hither! come hither! my little daughter,
And do not tremble so;
For I can weather the roughest gale,
That ever wind did blow.”
He wrapped her warm in his seaman’s coat,
Against the stinging blast;
He cut a rope from a broken spar,
And bound her to the mast.
“O father! I hear the church bells ring,
O say, what may it be?”
“’Tis a fog-bell on a rock-bound coast!”—
And he steered for the open sea.
“O father! I hear the sound of guns,
O say what may it be?”
“Some ship in distress, that cannot live
In such an angry sea!”
“O father! I see a gleaming light,
O say, what may it be?”
But the father answered never a word,—
A frozen corpse was he.
Lashed to the helm, all stiff and stark,
With his face turned to the skies,
The lantern gleamed through the gleaming snow
On his fixed and glassy eyes.
Then the maiden clasped her hands and prayed
That savèd she might be;
And she thought of Him who stilled the wave
On the Lake of Galilee.
And fast through the midnight dark and drear,
Through the whistling sleet and snow,
Like a sheeted ghost, the vessel swept
Towards the reef of Norman’s Woe.
And ever the fitful gusts between
A sound came from the land;
It was the sound of the trampling surf,
On the rocks and the hard sea-sand.
The breakers were right beneath her bows,—
She drifted a dreary wreck,
And the whooping billow swept the crew
Like icicles from her deck.
She struck where the white and fleecy waves
Looked soft as carded wool,
But the cruel rocks, they gored her side
Like the horns of an angry bull.
Her rattling shrouds, all sheathed in ice,
With the masts went by the board;
Like a vessel of glass she stove and sank—
Ho! Ho! the breakers roared!
At daybreak on the bleak sea-beach,
A fisherman stood aghast,
To see the form of a maiden fair
Lashed close to a drifting mast.
The salt sea was frozen on her breast,
The salt tears in her eyes;
And he saw her hair, like the brown sea-weed,
On the billows fall and rise.
Such was the wreck of the Hesperus,
In the midnight and the snow;
Oh! save us all from a death like this,
On the reef of Norman’s Woe!