I scoured along the gusty fen,
    A quarry for hunting Kelpie men.

    But only one could hold at my side: 
    “Brother, brother, I love thy stride.

    “Wilt thou follow thy whim to win
    My merry maid of the goblin kin?”

    I swerved from my trail, for he haunted my ear
    With his moaning jibe and his shadowy leer.

    So by good hap as we sped it fell,
    I fetched a circuit back for the well.

    Like a spilth of spume on the crest of the bore
    When the combing tides make in for shore,

    That runner ran whose love was a wraith;
    But the rider rode with revenge in his teeth.

    Another league, and I touch the goal,—­
    The mystic rune on the poplar bole,—­

    When the dusky eyes and the raven hair
    And the lithe brown arms shall greet me there.

I ran like a harrier on the trace
In the leash of that ghoul, and the wind gave chase.

A furlong now; I caught the gleam
Of the bubbling well with its tiny stream;

An arrowy burst; I cleared the beck;
And—­the Kelpie rider bestrode my neck.

* * * * *

Dawn, the still red winter dawn;
I awoke on the plain; the wind was gone;—­

All gracious and good as when God made
The living creatures, and none was afraid.

I stooped to drink of the wholesome spring
Under the poplars whispering: 

    Face to my face in that water clear—­
    The Kelpie rider’s jabbering leer!

    Ah, God! not me:  I was never so! 
    Sainted Louis, who can know

    The lords of life from the slaves of death? 
    What help avail the speeding breath

    Of the spirit that knows not self’s abode,—­
    When the soul is lost that knows not God?

    I turned me home by St. Louis’ Hall,
    Where the red sun burns on the windows tall.

    And I thought the world was strange and wild,
    And God with his altar only a child.

IV

    Again one year in the prime of June,
    I came to the well in the heated noon,

    Leaving Rochelle with its red roof tiles
    By the Pottery Gate before St. Giles,—­

    There where the flower market is,
    Where every morning up from Duprisse

    The flower girls come by the long white lane
    That skirts the edge of Bareau plain;—­

    To the North, the city wall in the sun,
    To the left, the fen where the eye may run

    And have its will of the blazing blue. 
    The while I loitered the market through,

    Halting a moment to converse
    With old Babette who had been my nurse,

    There passed through the stalls a woman, bright
    With a kirtle of cinnabar and white