A CHARM
(whereby a modern male adult mortal may be pleasantly initiated into the fairy state).
O male adult, O male adult!
This is the way we make a fairy:—
Quicunque vult
Silvis terrisque imperare,
Think upon oaks and thorns and ashes,
On glow-worms and on fire-fly flashes,
On rooty loams and stony brashes!
Then upon thyme and tansy think,
On fields of sainfoin, ruddy pink,
On dells deep down and rocks upreared,
On lad's-love and on old-man's-beard,
On spearmint and on silver sages,
On colewort and on saxifrages!
Then think on pools in dimmest haunts,
Unwhipped of any wind that rages,
Where the lithe flag her purple flaunts,
Where frogs go plopping round the edge
And gnats are humming through the sedge,
And on the leaf of each wide lily
The scaly newts do lay their eggs
And the small people dip their legs
To shatter the moonshine floating stilly
O'er the pool's mystic weedy dregs!
Think yet again on rolling hills
Where little sleepy new-born rills
Are bedded deep in upland mosses,
Where tiny stars of tormentils
Peer skyward with their golden gaze,
Where lichened dikes and shallow fosses
Are signs of far-forgotten days—
Forgotten save by us who roam
Those uplands nightly after gloam,
And, linking in our magic rings,
Whirl in a dazzle of dancing wings—
Us only whose hot eyes beheld
Fordone delights of vanished eld!
Think on it! think on it!
And think no more on what you quit—
On hearth and home, on streets and shops,
On trousers, ties, and hunting-tops—
Think no more on City dinners,
On office hours and all the winners—
For you are fitted by field and dell
Us to follow, with us to dwell,
To be for ever free from harm,
A fairy changeling by this charm,
To be the lord of light and mirth,
To be the lord of all the earth.
[After Orchardson's picture of Napoleon en route for St. Helena.]
THE NEW BELLEROPHON:
or, BOTHA'S SURPRISE PACKET.
[The Government of S. Africa are sending, as a present to the Mother-country, the ten men whom they regard as their leading undesirables.]
The world-wide attention aroused by the recent correspondence about Rule 18, by which a player loses the hole if his opponent's ball strikes him, his caddie or his clubs, is already brightening golf. The doctor, who was playing "three more," got "dormy" at the seventeenth with a beautiful quarter brassie backhander, which took the colonel in the lower chest.
But the colonel saved the game on the last green. The doctor (whose caddie's play was beyond all praise) was caught napping, for he failed to avoid a stab to leg (the odd) which just found his putter.