Set with jewels exceeding rich,
Was dancing a hornpipe over the clock,
But before the gargoyles had time to mock
From his shoulder crowed St. Peter's cock.

"_Kirikiree!_ Creative Love
That folds the emperor folds the dove.
No church is finished, though grand it be,
That lacks the beauty of charity.
Buttress your spire. _Kirikiree!_"

So our Emperor reared the spire anew,
Yon shaft of glory that cleaves the blue,
Held in its place by the lightest things
God ever fashioned, the wee, soft wings
Of the birds that join in our worshipings.

AN EASTER CHICK

"Only, what I feel is, that no charity at all can get rid of a
certain natural unkindness which I find in things themselves."

--Pater's _Marius the Epicurean_.

The grippe had held me a prostrate prisoner for weeks. Books, pencils,
people were forbidden. It was a strange but not unhappy Lent to lie
helpless day after day, gazing through my blessed square of window into
a first snowy, then blowy, often rainy and rarely sunshiny patch of
woodland, watching the brown oak leaves whirl in hurricane dances above
the pine-tops, and the crows wing their strong flight against the gray
of the sky. As a cumberer of the earth, I was meekly grateful for the
least attention from this active outdoor world, for the cheery pipings
of the chickadees, whose wee black bills pounded the marrow-bone on the
window-sill, for the guttural greetings of the white-breasted
nuthatches who played the acrobat on the swinging, open-work bag of
cracked walnuts outside the pane, even for the jeers of the bluejays
who swooped to the sash and dashed off like triumphant Dick Turpins
with our bounty of bread and cheese.

So Joy-of-Life, hearing of a Boston confectioner's pious offer to
bestow an Easter chicken on every customer who should alleviate the
fast by the purchase of two pounds of expensive candies at any time
during Holy Week, thought she would add to my feathered acquaintance a
more intimate companion. Herself an abominator of sweets, she
heroically passed a dollar and a half across the counter and received
in exchange, beside two boxes of riotous living, a tiny chick, only a
day or so out from egg and incubator.

It was pretty, she said, to see the interest with which the tired
shop-girls bent over that fluffy morsel of life, petting it with light
touches and soothing words, as it was tucked away, with India