ular. cmfwypemf----"
_The Star_.

A sporting effort to reproduce the effect of the barrage _obbligato_.

* * * * *

[Illustration: _Footpad_. "I HEAR A CYCLIST COMING. I'LL UPSET HIS
BIKE, AND THEN--"

BUT IT WAS MR. TUBER-CAINE, THE ALLOTMENT ENTHUSIAST, RETURNING FROM
HIS LABOURS.]

* * * * *

TO AN INFANT GNU.

Thomas (that may not be thine actual name
But it will serve as well as any other),
There be coarse souls to whom all flesh is game,
Who do not hail thee as a new-born brother
But merely as a thing at which to aim
Their fratricidal guns; they simply smother
The sense, which I for one cannot eschew,
Of soul relationship 'twixt man and gnu.

'Tis not, O surely not, for such as these
Those baby limbs are flung in lightsome capers;
Those puny bleatings were not meant to please
Facetious writers for the daily papers;
Let baser beasts inspire the obvious wheeze,
Wombats and wart-hogs, tortoises and tapirs;
These lack the subtle spell thy presence flings
About the spirit tuned to higher things.

Well could I picture thee, a dusky sprite,
With Dryad hoofs on Thracian ledges drumming,
When day is slipping from the arms of night
And all the hushed leaves whisper, "Pan is coming!"
And thou before him, leaping with delight,
Stirring all birds to song, all bees to humming
And buds to blossoming--but lo! at hand
A tablet reads, "_C. Gnu. Nyassaland_."

Thus they've described thy formidable sire,
A whiskered person with a chronic liver.
I feed him biscuits to appease his ire;
He eats the gift but fain would bite the giver.
His eye is red with reminiscent fire,
His thoughts are by the great Zambesi River
Where hides the hippopotam, huge as sin,
And slinking leopards with the dappled skin.

No couches of the nymph and Bassarid,
Or thymy meadows such as Simois glasses,
Lured his exulting feet, my jocund kid,
But veldt and kloof and waving jungle grasses,
Where lurk the python with unwinking lid,
And the lean lion, growling, as he passes,
His futile wrath against the hoarse baboons
That drape the rocks in chattering platoons.

Free of the waste he snuffed the breeze at morn,
The fleet-foot peer of sassaby and kudu;
The hunting leopard feared his bristling horn,
The foul hyaena voted him a