Buy my English posies! 
        Ye that have your own,
      Buy them for a brother’s sake
        Overseas, alone. 
      Weed ye trample underfoot
        Floods his heart abrim—­
      Bird ye never heeded,
        Oh, she calls his dead to him! 
Far and far our homes are set round the Seven Seas;
Woe for us if we forget, we that hold by these! 
Unto each his mother-beach, bloom and bird and land—­
Masters of the Seven Seas, oh, love and understand.

MUNICIPAL.

“Why is my District death-rate low?”
Said Binks of Hezabad. 
“Wells, drains, and sewage-outfalls are
My own peculiar fad. 
I learnt a lesson once.  It ran
Thus,” quoth that most veracious man:—­

It was an August evening and, in snowy garments clad,
I paid a round of visits in the lines of Hezabad;
When, presently, my Waler saw, and did not like at all,
A Commissariat elephant careering down the Mall.

I couldn’t see the driver, and across my mind it rushed
That that Commissariat elephant had suddenly gone musth. 
I didn’t care to meet him, and I couldn’t well get down,
So I let the Waler have it, and we headed for the town.

The buggy was a new one and, praise Dykes, it stood the strain,
Till the Waler jumped a bullock just above the City Drain; And the next that I remember was a hurricane of squeals, And the creature making toothpicks of my five-foot patent wheels.

He seemed to want the owner, so I fled, distraught with fear, To the Main Drain sewage outfall while he snorted in my ear—­ Reached the four-foot drain-head safely and, in darkness and despair, Felt the brute’s proboscis fingering my terror-stiffened hair,

Heard it trumpet on my shoulder—­tried to crawl a little higher—­
Found the Main Drain sewage-outfall blocked some eight feet up,
          with mire;
And, for twenty reeking minutes, Sir, my very marrow froze,
While the trunk was feeling blindly for a purchase on my toes!

It missed me by a fraction, but my hair was turning grey
Before they called the drivers up arid dragged the brute away. 
Then I sought the City Elders, and my words were very plain. 
They flushed that four-foot drain-head and—­it never choked again.

You may hold with surface-drainage, and the sun-for-garbage cure,
Till you’ve been a periwinkle shrinking coyly up a sewer.
I believe in well-flushed culverts ...  This is why the
          death-rate’s small;
And, if you don’t believe me, get shikarred yourself.  That’s all.

THE COASTWISE LIGHTS

Our brows are bound with spindrift and the weed is on our knees;
Our loins are battered ’neath us by the swinging, smoking seas. 
From reef and rock and skerry—­over headland, ness, and voe—­
The Coastwise Lights of England watch the ships of England go!