rate cast
To stem the gathering tide.

Eastward the Russian draws you to his fold,
Content, on his own ground, to bide his day,
Out of whose toils not many feet of old
Found the returning way.

And still along the seas our watchers keep
Their grip upon your throat with bands of steel,
While that Armada, which should rake the deep,
Skulks in its hole at Kiel.

So stands your record--stay, I cry you grace--
I wronged you. There is Belgium, where your sword
Has bled to death a free and gallant race
Whose life you held in ward;

Where on your trail the smoking land lies bare
Of hearth and homestead, and the dead babe clings
About its murdered mother's breast--ah, there,
Yes, you have done great things!

O. S.

* * * * *

TOMMY BROWN, RECRUITING SERGEANT.

Tommy Brown had been moved up into Form II., lest he should take root in
Form I. He had been recommended personally by the master of Form I.
to Mr. Smith, the guardian deity of Form II., as "the absolute
limit." After a year of Tommy, Mr. Smith had begun to mention him
in his prayers, not so much for Tommy's good as for his own
deliverance--mentally including him in the category of plague,
pestilence, famine and sudden death.

Though the pervading note of Mr. Smith's report upon Tommy was gloom,
deep gloom, he must have had some dim hopes of him, for, at the end of
the Summer Term, he had placed his hand upon Tommy's head and said,
"Never mind, my boy, we shall make a man of you some day."

A new term had begun; Tommy Brown had mobilised two days late, but he
was in time for Mr. Smith's lecture on "The War, boys."

The orator spoke for an hour and a quarter, and at the end he wiped his
brows with the blackboard duster under the impression that it was his
handkerchief. Meanwhile Tommy had eaten three apples, caught four flies,
written "Kiser" in chalk on the back of the boy in front of him,
exchanged a catapult with Jones minor for a knife, cut his finger, and
made faces at each of the four new boys. Mr. Smith caught him in one of
these contortions, but he was speaking of Louvain at the moment and took
it as a compliment.

Suddenly Tommy found himself confronted with a number of sheets of clean
paper. "The essay is to be written on one side of the paper only," said
Mr. Smith.

Tommy asked the boy next to him what they had to write about, an