THE MISSIONARY.
Where Oriental calm derides
Our Occidental stress
And Ninety-seven E. collides
With Five-and-twenty S.,
You’ll find a product of the West,
A Bachelor of Arts,
Who blends a mind of youthful zest
With patriarchal parts.
Each morning mid his rubber trees
He rides an ancient hack,
A cassock girt above his knees,
A topee tilted back.
Now reining in his steed to preach
A parable on sap,
Now vaulting from his seat to teach
The proper way to tap.
His swart disciples knit their brows
O’er algebraic signs;
They build their byres, they milk their cows
On scientific lines.
They use his microscope and gaze
On strange bacterial risks;
They tuns their daily hymns of praise
To gramophonic discs.
And every evening after grace,
When converts clear the cloth,
He pins an orchid to its place
Or camphorates a moth.
Out of the world his path may run,
Yet still in worldly wise
He’ll talk of feats with rod or gun,
A twinkle in his eyes,
And tell of tiger-stalking nights,
Of mornings with the snipe,
With never a pause save when he lights
An antiquated pipe.
We others earn our pensioned ease,
The furlough of our kind;
We book our berths, we cross the seas,
But he shall stay behind,
Plodding his round of feast and fast,
Dreaming the dreams of yore,
Of England as he saw her last
In 1884.
J. M. S.