Rejoice!  To Arizona has the Saviour vouchsafed His Grace
For our Salvation Army lass teaches true Gospel faith: 
“Be saved this night, poor sinner, repent, the hour is late! 
Salvation is in store for thee, brother do not delay
As fleeting time and sudden death for no man ever wait!”
“Praise God!” the lassie’s war-cry is, the keynote of her song. 
To the tune of “Annie Roonie” and kindred fervid lay
With mandolin and banjo, marching in bold array
The devil’s strongholds strorming, battling to victory-
With banners flying, the tambourine and drum
Forever has she silenced the shamans vile tom-tom. 
All Fetish Spirit-medicine she has tabooed, banished away
Except bourbon and rye, sour-mash, hand-made
And copper-distilled, licensed, taxed and gauged,
Then stored in bond to ripen, mellow, age. 
God bless the Army, rank and file who fight our souls to save! 
Modern disciples of the Son pf Man, true followers of Christ,
They work by day, then preach and pray and pound their drum at night.

L’ENVOY.

Farewell, this ends my rhyming, submitted at its worth. 
Lest I forget—­pride goes before the fall, on earth
And exceeding fine if slowly, grind the mills of angry gods—­
The muses’ steed, a versifying bronco had I caught
And recklessly I rode; but fast as thought
Fate overtook me when Pegasus bucked me off. 
Sorely distressed I hear a satyr’s mocking laugh
As on my laurels resting, on my seat of honor cast
And thanking you for kind attention now your indulgent censure ask.

THE BIRTH OF ARIZONA. (AN ALLEGORICAL TALE.)

On the summit of a mountain I staked my claim; in the shade of a balsam-spruce I built my hut.

When the south wind that rises on the desert climbs to the mountain’s ridge and rustling among silvery needles, rattles the cones on boughs and twigs—­the tree-giant whispers with resinous breath, bemoaning the fate of a prehistoric civilization, and lisps of the mystery and romance of a humanity long extinct, mourning for races forgotten and vanished.

Alone—­unrivaled in her weird, wild grandeur stands Arizona where spiry rock-ribbed giants stab an emerald, opal-tinted sky, and terraced mesas of wondrous amber hue form natural stairways, that grandly wrought were carved step after step, through successive epochs of erosion, affording thus an easy ascent to the rugged profile of this land of the Western Hemisphere.  All this is of historic record in stony cypher of geology indelibly engraved by time on the rocky walls of deepest canyons, as traceable from the primordial archaean to our present era, the age of man.

In tremor-spasms of terrestrial creation, ’midst chaotic fiery turmoil of volcanos, out of the depth of globe-encircling waters, from the womb of Universe—­Eternity—­came the Almighty Word, and then was born fair Arizona.