Days of the Discoverers eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 311 pages of information about Days of the Discoverers.

Days of the Discoverers eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 311 pages of information about Days of the Discoverers.

[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      Are out of date as an old wife’s rune.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.

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Days of the Discoverers from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.