mile
And the sleeves of 1888.

Miss Perdee's face is stifled as a sonnet;
Upon her wire-tight hair a duck-shaped bonnet
Nests, nodding with a _cachepeigne_
Of violets on it.

East Bay, some tea and talk, them home by King.
The horses have an antiquated plod;
The team is old, but not too old to balk
If driven north of Broad.

Miss Perdee wears the sure air of a queen,
Which only queens and Perdees can achieve.
The Perdees had blue blood in Adam's veins
When Adam had the rib he gave to Eve.

Back through the wrought-iron gate
Miss Perdee drives in state.
Miss Perdee lives down on the Battery!
Beyond debate.

H.A.

MARSH TACKIES[12]

Browsing on the salty marsh grass,
Barrel-ribbed and blowsy-bellied,
With a neigh as shrill as whistles
And their mouths red-raw from thistles,
I have seen the brown _marsh tackies_,
Hiding in the swamps at Kiawah,
With the gray mosquito patches
Gory on their shaggy thatches.
Balky, vicious, and degenerates,
They are small as Spanish jennets,
But their sires were with El Tarab,
When he conquered Andalusia
For the Prophet and the Arab;
And they came with Ponce de Leon,
When the Spaniard made a _peon_
And a Christian of the Carib.
Peering from palmetto thickets
At some fort's coquina wickets,
Startled Indians saw them grazing,
Thunder-stamping and amazing
As the beasts from other stars,
When they galloped down savannas,
And their masters seemed centaurs
With the new white metal blazing.
Thus they came, these little beasts,
With the men-at-arms and priests,
In the west with Coronado
When he reached the Colorado,
In the east with bold De Soto
In the search for El Dorado,
And they packed the bells and toys
That the chieftains loved like boys;
Struggling through the swamps and briars
After dons and tonsured friars;
Dying in the forests dismal,
Till the shrill of silver clarion
Brought the buzzards to the carrion
Round the smoke of lonely fires
In a continent abysmal.

So De Soto left them dying,
Heedless of their human crying;
Here he turned them loose to die
Underneath a foreign sky;
But they lived on thicket dross,
On the leaves and Spanish moss--
And I wonder, and I wonder,
When I hear the startled th