[2] The account of Smith’s campaigns and signalling code is given in his autobiography.
[3] The Delaware.
[4] Some authorities consider the Hudson River to be actually a fiord or fjord and not a true river.
[5] Greenwich Village.
IMPERIALISM
The Tailor sat with his goose
on the table—
(Table of Laws
it was, he said)
Fashioning uniforms dyed in
sable,
Picked out with
gold and sanguine red.
“This,” he said
as he snipped and drafted,
“Sublimely
foreshadowing cosmic Fate
With world-dominion august,
resplendent,
Will wear, as
nothing can wear but Hate!
“Chimerical
dreams of souls romantic
Are out of date
as an old wife’s rune.
Britain is doomed as Plato’s
Republic—”
When in at the
door came a lilting tune!
"Here
to-day and gone to-morrow—
All
in the luck of the road!
Didn’t
come to stay forever,
But
we’ll take our share of the load!"
Highlanders, Irish,
Danes, Egyptians,
Norman or Slav
the dialects ran;
Something more than a board-school
shaped them—
Drill and discipline
never made man!
Once they knew Crecy, Hastings,
Drogheda,
Moscow, Assaye,
Khartoum or Glencoe,—
Now the old hatreds are tinder
for campfires.
England has only
her world to show!
They are not dreamers, these
men of the Empire,
Guarding their
land in the old-time way,
And this is the
style that prevails in the Legions,—
“The foe
of the past is a friend to-day.”
"It’s
a long, long road to the Empire
(From
Beersheba even to Dan)
And
the time is rather late for a chronic Hymn of Hate,—
And
we know the tailor doesn’t make the man!"
XIX
ADMIRAL OF NEW ENGLAND
Barefoot and touzle-headed, in the coarse russet and blue homespun of an apprentice, a small boy sidled through the wood. Like a hunted hedgehog, he was ready to run or fight. Where a bright brook slid into the meadows, he stopped, and looked through new leaves at the infinite blue of the sky. Words his grandfather used to read to him came back to his mind.
“Let the inhabitants of the rock sing, let them shout from the top of the mountain.”
The Bible which old Joseph Bradford had left to his grandson had been taken away, but no one could take away the memory of it. If he had dared, Will would have shouted aloud then and there. For all his hunger and weariness and dread of the future the strength of the land entered into his young soul. He drank of the clear brook, and let it wash away the soil of his pilgrimage. Then he curled himself in a hollow full of dry leaves, and went to sleep.