played with their hair,
And rustled the golden grasses against the stone,
And laughed and was gone
To waken the wild white flowers of the sea,
And sing a song of the days that were,
A song of memory, gay and blind
As the sun on the graves that it left behind;
For this, ah this, was the song of the wind.

I

She sat on the tarred old jetty, with a sailor's careless ease,
And the clear waves danced around her feet and kissed her tawny knees;
Her head was bare, and her thick black hair was coiled behind a throat
Chiselled as hard and bright and bold as the bow of a sailing boat.

II

Her eyes were blue, and her jersey was blue as the lapping,
slapping seas,
And the rose in her cheek was painted red by the brisk Atlantic breeze;
And she sat and waited her father's craft, while Dan Trevennick's eyes
Were sheepishly watching her sunlit smiles and her soft contented
sighs.

III

For he thought he would give up his good black pipe and his evening
glasses of beer,
And blunder to chapel on Sundays again for a holy Christian year,
To hold that foot in his hard rough hand and kiss the least of
its toes:
Then he swore at himself for a great damned fool; which he probably
was, God knows.

IV

Often in summer twilights, too, he would sit on a coil of rope,
As the stars came out in their twinkling crowds to play with wonder
and hope,
While he watched the side of her clear-cut face as she sat on the
jetty and fished,
And even to help her coil her line was more than he hoped or wished.

V

But once or twice o'er the dark green tide he saw with a solemn
delight,
Hooked and splashing after her line, a flash and a streak of white;
As hand over hand she hauled it up, a great black conger eel,
For Dan Trevennick to kill as it squirmed with its head beneath
his heel.

VI

And at last, with a crash and a sunset cry from the low soft evening
star,
A shadowy schooner suddenly loomed o'er the dark green oily bar;
With fairy-like spars and misty masts in the golden dusk of gloaming,
Where the last white seamew's wide-spread wings were wistfully
westward roaming;

VII

Then the song of the foreign seamen rose in the magical evening air,
Faint and far away, as i