_It is not given_ _For goods or gear_ _But for The Thing._ A CENTURION OF THE THIRTIETH _Cities and Thrones and Powers,_ _Stand in Time’s eye,_ _Almost as long as flowers,_ _Which daily die:_ _But, as new buds put forth,_ _To glad new men,_ _Out of the spent and unconsidered Earth,_ _The Cities rise again._ _This season’s Daffodil,_ _She never hears,_ _What change, what chance, what chill,_ _Cut down last year’s;_ _But with bold countenance,_ _And knowledge small,_ _Esteems her seven days’ continuance_ _To be perpetual._ _So Time that is o’er-kind,_ _To all that be,_ _Ordains us e’en as blind,_ _As bold as she:_ _That in our very death,_ _And burial sure,_ _Shadow to shadow, well-persuaded, saith,_ _‘See how our works endure!’_ A CENTURION OF THE THIRTIETH Dan had come to grief over his Latin, and was kept in; so Una went alone to Far Wood. Dan’s big catapult and the lead bullets that Hobden had made for him were hidden in an old hollow beech-stub on the west of the wood. They had named the place out of the verse in _Lays of Ancient Rome_. From lordly Volaterrae, Where scowls the far-famed hold, Piled by the hands of giants For Godlike Kings of old. They were the ‘Godlike Kings,’ and when old Hobden piled some comfortable brushwood between the big wooden knees of Volaterrae, they called him ‘Hands of Giants.’ Una slipped through their private gap in the fence, and sat still a while, scowling as scowlily and lordlily as she knew how; for ‘Volaterrae’ is an important watch-tower that juts out of Far Wood just as Far Wood juts out of the hillside. Pook’s Hill lay below her, and all the turns of the brook as it wanders from out of the Willingford Woods, between hop-gardens, to old Hobden’s cottage at the Forge. The Sou’-West wind (there is always a wind by ‘Volaterrae’) blew from the bare ridge where Cherry Clack Windmill stands. Now wind prowling through woods sounds like exciting things going to happen, and that is why on ‘blowy days’ you stand up in Volaterrae and shout bits of the _Lays_ to suit its noises. Una took Dan’s catapult from its secret place, and made ready to meet Lars Porsena’s army stealing through the wind-whitened aspens by the brook. A gust boomed up the valley, and Una chanted sorrowfully: ‘Verbenna down to Ostia Hath wasted all the plain; Astur hath stormed Janiculum And the stout guards are slain.’ But the wind, not charging fair to the wood, started aside and shook a single oak in Gleason’s pasture. Here it made itself all small and crouched among the grasses, waving the tips of them as a cat waves the tip of her tail before she springs. ‘Now welcome—welcome Sextus,’ sang Una, loading the catapult— ‘Now welcome to thy home, Why dost thou turn and run away? Here lies the rod of Rome.’