In fancy I listened, in fancy could hear
  The thrum of the shrouds and the creak of the gear,
  The patter of reef-points on topsails a-shiver,
  The song of the jibs when they tauten and quiver,
  The cry of the frigate-bird following after,
  The bow-wave that broke with a gurgle like laughter. 
  And I looked on my youth with its pleasure and pain,
  And the shipmate I loved was beside me again. 
  In a ship in a bottle a-sailing away
  In the flying-fish weather through rainbows of spray,
  Over oceans of wonder by headlands of gleam,
  To the harbours of Youth on the wind of a dream.

C.F.S.

* * * * *

“HIGH COMMISSIONER PAYS CALLS.

    Jerusalem, August 27.—­The High Commissioner visited yesterday
    afternoon the tomb of Abraham, Sarah, Rebecca, Isaac, Jacob and
    Leah in the Cave of Makpela at Hebron.”—­Egyptian Mail.

No flowers, by request.

* * * * *

[Illustration:  THE GREAT REPUDIATION.

MR. SMILLIE.  “HERE, HOP IT, OR YOU’LL SPOIL THE WHOLE SHOW.  YOU DON’T
COME ON TILL MY NEXT TRICK.”]

* * * * *

[Illustration:  M.F.H.  “WHY THE DEUCE AREN’T YOU WITH HOUNDS?  THEY’RE IN THE NEXT PARISH BY THIS.”

New Whip (rib-roasting very bad cub-hunter). “’TAIN’T SAFE TO GO NEAR ’EM WITH THIS ’ORSE; THEY MIGHT THINK ’E WAS FOR EATIN’.”]

* * * * *

THE BEN AND THE BOOT.

Whither in these littered and overcrowded islands should one flee to escape the spectacle of outworn and discarded boots?  I should go to a mountain-top and amongst mountain-tops I should choose the highest.  I should scale the summit of Ben Nevis.

Yet it is but a few days since I saw on that proud eminence the unmistakable remains of an ordinary walking boot.

It reposed on the perilous edge of a snowdrift that even in summer curves giddily over the lip of the dreadful gulf over which the eastern precipice beetles.  There is ever a certain pathos about discarded articles of apparel:  a baby’s outgrown shoe, a girl’s forgotten glove, an abandoned bowler; but the situation of this boot, thus high uplifted towards the eternal stars, gave to it a mystery, a grandeur, a sublimity that held me long in contemplation.

How came it there?

The path that winds up that grey mountain is rough; its harsh stones and remorseless gradients take toll of leather as of flesh.  Yet half a sole and a sound upper are better than no boot; and what climber but would postpone till after his descent the discarding of his damaged footgear?

Could it be, I asked myself, the relic and evidence of an inhuman crime?  Was it possible that some party of climbers, arriving at the top lunchless and desperately hungry, had sacrificed their plumpest, disposing of his clothes over the cliff, but failing to hole out with this tell-tale boot?