nd lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

JOYCE KILMER.

BLOCKING THE CHANNEL

Bruges is an important city of Belgium made familiar to American boys
and girls by Longfellow's beautiful poem, "The Belfry of Bruges." He
describes what "the belfry old and brown" has seen.

"Till the bell of Ghent responded o'er lagoon and dike of sand,
'I am Roland! I am Roland! there is victory in the land.'"

What a terrible story the historian or poet will have to tell who
narrates what the belfry of Bruges has seen during the fifty-two months
of the World War, a year, we may call it, in which each week had become
a month.

The port of Bruges, called Zeebrugge or Bruges on the Sea, lies not far
from the city, at the mouth of a maritime canal. The entrance to this
canal was protected by a great crescent-shaped mole thirty feet high
inclosing the harbor.

The Germans in the shipbuilding yards at Antwerp built small warships
and submarines and sent them over the canals across Belgium to Ostend
and Zeebrugge, from where they went out to destroy Allied shipping.

The English determined to put an end to this and on the night of April
22, 1918, an expedition was sent to block the channel and to destroy as
far as possible the mole which protected it. It has been said that it
was "one of the most thrilling and picturesque of the naval operations
of the war. To Americans it recalled Hobson's exploit with the
Merrimack, at Santiago, while to Englishmen it brought back memories of
Sir Francis Drake and his fire ships in the harbor of Cadiz." The
fight lasted only an hour but the British lost 588 men, for the channel
and the mole were so fully guarded with searchlights, machine guns, and
artillery that such an attempt was looked upon by the Germans as
foolhardy and doomed to absolute failure.

A British cruiser, the _Vindictive_, in charge of Commander Alfred F.
B. Carpenter, with two ferryboats, the _Daffodil_ and the _Iris_, were
to escort six obsolete British cruisers filled with concrete and sand
to the harbor mouths at Ostend and Zeebrugge and to sink them there in
the channels. The ferryboats carried sailors and marines who were to
attack and destroy the mole. It was thought that this attack would
divert the attenti