I told him this is a pleasant life To set your breast to the bark of trees That all your days are dim beneath, And reaching up with a little knife, To loose the resin and take it down And bring it to market when you please. THE LINE-GANG Here come the line-gang pioneering by. They throw a forest down less cut than broken. They plant dead trees for living, and the dead They string together with a living thread. They string an instrument against the sky Wherein words whether beaten out or spoken Will run as hushed as when they were a thought. But in no hush they string it: they go past With shouts afar to pull the cable taut, To hold it hard until they make it fast, To ease away--they have it. With a laugh, An oath of towns that set the wild at naught They bring the telephone and telegraph. THE VANISHING RED He is said to have been the last Red Man In Acton. And the Miller is said to have laughed-- If you like to call such a sound a laugh. But he gave no one else a laugher's license. For he turned suddenly grave as if to say, "Whose business,--if I take it on myself, Whose business--but why talk round the barn?-- When it's just that I hold with getting a thing done with." You can't get back and see it as he saw it. It's too long a story to go into now. You'd have to have been there and lived it. Then you wouldn't have looked on it as just a matter Of who began it between the two races. Some guttural exclamation of surprise The Red Man gave in poking about the mill Over the great big thumping shuffling mill-stone Disgusted the Miller physically as coming From one who had no right to be heard from. "Come, John," he said, "you want to see the wheel pit?" He took him down below a cramping rafter, And showed him, through a manhole in the floor, The water in desperate straits like frantic fish, Salmon and sturgeon, lashing with their tails. Then he shut down the trap door with a ring in it That jangled even above the general noise, And came up stairs alone--and gave that laugh, And said something to a man with a meal-sack That the man with the meal-sack didn't catch--then. Oh, yes, he showed John the wheel pit all right. SNOW The three stood listening to a fresh access Of wind that caught against the house a moment, Gulped snow, and then blew free again--the Coles Dressed, but dishevelled from some hours of sleep, Meserve belittled in the great skin coat he wore.