ANOTHER CRISIS.
(By a Futility Rabbit Keeper.)
There is a rabbit in the pansy bed,
There is a burrow underneath the wall,
There is a rabbit everywhere you tread,
To-day I heard a rabbit in the hall,
The same that sits at evening in my shoes
And sings his usefulness, or simply chews;
There is no corner sacred to the Muse—
And how shall man demobilise them all?
Far back, when England was devoid of food,
Men bade me breed the coney and I bought
Timber and wire-entanglements and hewed
Fair roomy palaces of pine-wood wrought,
Wherein our first-bought sedulously gnawed
And every night escaped and ran abroad;
Yet she was lovely and we named her Maud,
And if she ate the primulas, 'twas nought.
The months rolled onward and she multiplied,
And all her progeny resembled her;
They ate the daffodils; they seldom died;
And no one thought of them as provender;
The children fed them weekly for a treat,
And my wife said, "The little things—how sweet!
If you imagine I can ever eat
A rabbit called Persephone, you err."
Yet famine might have hardened that proud breast,
Only that victory removed the threat;
And now, if e'er I venture to suggest
That it is time that some of them were ate,
That Maud is pivotal and costing pounds,
And how the garden is a mass of mounds,
She answers me, on military grounds,
"Peace is not come. We cannot eat them yet."
So I shall steal to yon allotment space
With a large bag of rabbits, and unseen
Demobilise them, and in that fair place
They all shall browse on cauliflower and bean;
There Smith will come on Saturday, and think
That it is shell-shock or disease or drink;
But Maud shall dwell for ever there and sink
A world of burrows in Laburnum Green. A.P.H.