Little he guessed how wind and tide Should be the sport of human skill; How steel and steam should mock their pride And get the deep reduced to _nil_; How we should come in course of years, Either by cable or Marconi, To hold across the hemispheres A conversazione. He'd learn with even more surprise That, after working all this while On ways and means to minimise The severance of isle and isle, Erin we find as far away, As rudely severed by a windy sea, As Athens seemed in Horace' day From old Brundusium (Brindisi). Strange, too, in yonder hybrid land This myth about a racial knot Binding the gay Hibernian and The dourly earnest Ulster-Scot-- Neighbours whose one and only link (A foil to their profound disparity) Is--thanks to some volcanic kink-- A common insularity. Come, let us down this myth in dust; Let statesmen's time no more be spent To fake a "race" from what is just A geologic accident; Let a great brig across the strait, Where Scot to Scot may freely pass, go, And Ulster find her natural mate In consanguineous Glasgow. O. S. * * * * * A HAZARD ON THE HOME GREEN. Standing on our front door-step you can see our garden running down at a moderate speed to our front gate. Or, conversely, standing at the front gate, you can see it mounting in a leisurely fashion to the front door. In either case it consists of two narrow strips of lawn bisected by a well-kept perambulator drive. Beyond the grass on either side blooms a profusion of bless-my-soul-if-I-haven't-forgotten-agains and other quaintly named old-world English flowers. On the left-hand strip of lawn, looking gatewards, is the metal pin to which the captive golf-ball is tied. On the right is the pear-tree, to which later on we have to affix a captive pear. "What I like about the garden," I said to Araminta when we first moved in, "is the fact that it is in front, so that visitors, instead of saying in a perfunctory way, 'Have you got a garden, too? How delightful!' will be forced to murmur, 'How sweet the clover smelt on your lawn as we came up the drive. What a perfectly entrancing golf-ball.' If I must go to the trouble and expense of keeping up a private pleasaunce I want everybody to see the pleasantry of it at once." "Swank," replied Araminta. She is absurdly early-Georgian in the matter of repartee.