f passionate life that surged in him
And winged his spurning feet.

And then my eyes went dim.
The Marshal's gun was out.
I saw the grim
Short barrel, and his face
Aflame with the excitement of the chase.
He was an honest sportsman, as they go.
He never shot a doe,
Or spotted fawn,
Or partridge on the ground.
And, as for Joe,
He'd wait until he had a yard to go.
Then, if he missed, he'd laugh and call it square.
My gaze leapt to the corner--waited there.
And now an arm would reach it. I saw hope flare
Across the runner's face.

Then, like a pang
In my own heart,
The pistol rang.

The form I watched soared forward, spun the curve.
"By God, you've missed!"
The Marshal shook his head.
No, there he lay, face downward in the road.
"I reckon he was dead
Before he hit the ground,"
The Marshal said.
"Just once, at fifty feet,
A moving target too.
That's just about as good
As any man could do!
A little tough;
But, since he ran,
I call it fair enough."

He mopped his head, and started down the road.
The silence eddied round him, turned and flowed
Slowly back and pressed against the ears.
Until unnumbered flies set it to droning,
And, down the heat, I heard a woman moaning.

D.H.

[7] "Contemporary Verse," prize poem for 1921.

ECLIPSE

Once melodies of street-cries washed these walls,
Glad as the refluent song
Of cheerful waters from a happy spring
That shout their way along;
Such cries were born in other days from lips
A spirit taught to sing. Now it is gone!

Memory expects those hymns for shrimp and prawn,
Or the mellifluous chaunt from the black gorge
Of Orpheus inside a murky skin,
Who looked the gold sun in the eye
While garden mists grew thin,
And intoned "_Hoppin' John_!"

As when the shadow of the gray eclipse
Haggards the countryside,
When moon-fooled birds have nothing more to say,
And soft untimely bats begin to slide;
As darkness sweeps the morning light away,
So silence brushes music now from lips.

Oh! Can it be the songless spirit of this age
Has slain the ancient music, or that ears
Have harsher thresholds? Only this I know:
The streets grow more discordant with the years;
And that which bids the huckster sing no more,
Will