* * * * *

[Illustration:  Teacher. “AND RUTH WALKED BEHIND THE REAPERS, PICKING UP THE CORN THAT THEY LEFT.  JOHN, WHAT DO WE CALL THAT?”

John (very virtuously).  “PINCHING.”]

* * * * *

A SHIP IN A BOTTLE.

  In a sailormen’s restaurant Rotherhithe way,
  Where the din of the docksides is loud all the day,
  And the breezes come bringing off basin and pond
  And all the piled acres of lumber beyond
  From the Oregon ranges the tang of the pine
  And the breath of the Baltic as bracing as wine,
  In a fly-spotted window I there did behold,
  Among the stale odours of hot food and cold,
  A ship in a bottle some sailor had made
  In watches below, swinging South with the Trade,
  When the fellows were patching old dungaree suits,
  Or mending up oilskins and leaky seaboots,
  Or whittling a model or painting a chest,
  Or yarning and smoking and watching the rest.

  In fancy I saw him all weathered and browned,
  Deep crows’-feet and wrinkles his eyelids around;
  A pipe in the teeth that seemed little the worse
  For Liverpool pantiles and stringy salt-horse;
  The hairy forearm with its gaudy tattoo
  Of a bold-looking female in scarlet and blue;
  The fingers all roughened and toughened and scarred,
  With hauling and hoisting so calloused and hard,
  So crooked and stiff you would wonder that still
  They could handle with cunning and fashion with skill
  The tiny full-rigger predestined to ride
  To its cable of thread on its green-painted tide
  In its wine-bottle world, while the old world went on
  And the sailor who made it was long ago gone.

And still as he worked at the toy on his knee He would spin his old yarns of the ships and the sea, Thermopylae, Lightning, Lothair and Red Jacket, With many another such famous old packet, And many a bucko and dare-devil skipper In Liverpool blood-boat or Colonies’ clipper; The sail that they carried aboard the Black Ball, Their skysails and stunsails and ringtail and all, And storms that they weathered and races they won And records they broke in the days that are done.

  Or sometimes he’d sing you some droning old song,
  Some old sailors’ ditty both mournful and long,
  With queer little curlycues, twiddles and quavers,
  Of smugglers and privateers, pirates and slavers,
  “The brave female smuggler,” the “packet of fame
  That sails from New York and the Dreadnought’s her name,”
  And “all on the coast of the High Barbaree,”
  And “the flash girls of London was the downfall of he.”