Their psychology is bovine, their outlook crude and rare; They abandon vital matters to be tickled with a straw; But the straw that they were tickled with--the chaff that they were fed with-- They convert into a weaver's beam to break their foeman's head with. For undemocratic reasons and for motives not of State, They arrive at their conclusions--largely inarticulate. Being void of self-expression they confide their views to none; But sometimes, in a smoking-room, one learns why things were done. In telegraphic sentences, half swallowed at the ends, They hint a matter's inwardness--and there the matter ends. And while the Celt is talking from Valencia to Kirkwall, The English--ah, the English!--don't say anything at all! LITTLE FOXES A TALE OF THE GIHON HUNT A fox came out of his earth on the banks of the Great River Gihon, which waters Ethiopia. He saw a white man riding through the dry dhurra-stalks, and, that his destiny might be fulfilled, barked at him. The rider drew rein among the villagers round his stirrup. “What,” said he, “is that?” “That,” said the Sheikh of the village, “is a fox, O Excellency Our Governor.” “It is not, then, a jackal?” “No jackal, but Abu Hussein the father of cunning.” “Also,” the white man spoke half aloud, “I am Mudir of this Province.” “It is true,” they cried. “Ya, Saart el Mudir” (O Excellency Our Governor). The Great River Gihon, well used to the moods of kings, slid between his mile-wide banks toward the sea, while the Governor praised God in a loud and searching cry never before heard by the river. When he had lowered his right forefinger from behind his right ear, the villagers talked to him of their crops--barley, dhurrah, millet, onions, and the like. The Governor stood in his stirrups. North he looked up a strip of green cultivation a few hundred yards wide that lay like a carpet between the river and the tawny line of the desert. Sixty miles that strip stretched before him, and as many behind. At every half-mile a groaning water-wheel lifted the soft water from the river to the crops by way of a mud-built aqueduct. A foot or so wide was the water-channel; five foot or more high was the bank on which it ran, and its base was broad in proportion. Abu Hussein, misnamed the Father of Cunning, drank from the river below his earth, and his shadow was long in the low sun. He could not understand the loud cry which the Governor had cried. The Sheikh of the village spoke of the crops from which the rulers of all lands draw revenue; but the Governor's eyes were fixed, between his horse's ears, on the nearest water-channel. “Very like a ditch in Ireland,” he murmured, and smiled, dreaming of a razor-topped bank in distant Kildare.