m;
Quite plaintively to her it coos
Marvelous lays of sea and storm.

It whispers of a fairy home
With coral halls and pearly floors,
Where mermaids clad in glist'ning gold
Guard smilingly the jeweled doors.

She listens and her weird gray eyes
Grow weirder in their pensive gaze.
The sea birds toss her tangled curls,
The skiff lights glimmer through the haze.

Oh, strange sea-singer! what has lent
Such fascination to thy spell?
Is some celestial guardian
Prisoned within thee, tiny shell?

[Illustration: The Enchanted Shell]

The maid sits rapt until the stars
In myriad shining clusters gleam;
"Enchanted Una," she is called
By boatmen gliding down the stream.

The tempest beats the restless seas,
The wind blows loud, fierce from the skies;
Sweet, sylph-like Una clasps the shell,
Peace brooding in her quiet eyes.

The wind blows wilder, darkness comes,
The rock is bare, night birds soar far;
Thick clouds scud o'er the gloomy heav'ns
Unvisited by any star.

Where is quaint Una? On some isle,
Dreaming 'mid music, may she be?
Or does she listen to the shell
In coral halls within the sea?

The boatmen say on stormy nights
They see rare Una with the shell,
Sitting in pensive attitude,
Is it a vision? Who can tell?

BEHIND A GEORGIA MULE

JAMES WELDON JOHNSON

Now if you wish to travel fast,
I beg you not to fool
With locomotion that's procured
Behind a Georgia mule.

When I was teaching school in the backwoods of Georgia I had, one day,
to attend to some business in Mudville, an embryo city about eleven
miles from my school. Now you must know that a country school teacher
can do nothing without first consulting his Board of Trustees; so I
notified that honorable body that there was some business of vast
importance to be attended to, and asked them to meet me on Friday
afternoon; they all promised to be on hand "two hours b'sun." Friday
afternoon, after school was dismissed, they came in one by one until
they had all gathered.

As the chairman called the meeting to order, he said: "Brederen, de
objick ob dis meeting is to consider de ways ob pervidin de means ob
transposin de 'fessar to Mudville." Now, by the way, the chairman of the
Board was undoubtedly intended by nature for a smart man. He had a very
strong weakness for using big words