_S-r A-g-st-s Dr-r-l-n-s._--A month's well-deserved rest. _N-b-dy in P-rt-c-l-r._--A legacy of £100,000. _Ev-ryb-dy in G-n-r-l._--Rates and taxes. * * * * * [Illustration: SO FRIVOLOUS! _Wife_. "SOLOMON, I HAVE A BONE TO PICK WITH YOU." _Solomon_ (_flippantly_). "WITH PLEASURE, MY DEAR, SO LONG AS IT'S A FUNNY BONE!"] * * * * * THE DYNAMITE DRAGON. A dragon! Faugh! that foul and writhing Worm Seems scarcely worthy of the ancient term That fills old myth, and typifies the fight 'Twixt wrathful evil and the force of right. The dragons of the prime, fierce saurian things With ogre gorges and with harpy wings, Fitted their hour; the haunts that gave them birth, The semi-chaos of the early earth, The slime, the earthquake shock, the whelming flood, Made battle ground for the colossal brood. But now, when centuries of love and light Have warmed and brightened man's old home; when might Is not all sinister, nor all desire Fierce appetite, that all-devouring fire,-- When life is not alone a wasting scourge, But from the swamps of soulless strife emerge Some Pisgah peaks of promise where the dove Finds footing, high the whirling gulfs above,-- Now the intrusion of this loathly shape, With pestilence-breathing jaws that blackly gape For indiscriminate prey, is sure a thing To set celestial guards once more a-wing; To fire a new St. Michael or St. George With the bright death to cleave the monster's gorge, And trample out the Laidly Worm's last breath In the convulsions of reluctant death. A crawling, craven, sneaking, snaking brute; Purposeless spite, and hatred absolute, In hideous shape incarnate! Venomed Gad In Civilisation's path; malignant-mad, And blindly biting; raising an asp-neck In Beauty's foot-tracks, and prepared to wreck The ordered work of ages in a day, To raze and shatter, to abase and slay. Blind as the earthquake, headlong as the storm, Yet in such hideous subter-human form, Vulgar as venomous! Dragon indeed, And dangerous, but with no soul save greed, No aim save chaos. Bloody, yet so blind, The common enemy of humankind; Whose age-stored works and ways it yearns to blast, To smite to ruined fragments, and to cast Prone--as itself is prone--in common dust. The Beautiful, the Wise, the Strong, the Just, All fruit of labour, and all spoil of thought, All that co-operant Man hath won or wrought, All that the heart has loved, the mind has taught Through the long generations, hoarded gains Of plastic fancies, and of potent brains; Thrones, Temples, Marts, Art's alcoves, Learning's domes, Patrician palaces, and _bourgeois_ homes. Down, down!--to glut _its_ spleen, the paltry thing, Impotent, save to lurk, and coil, and spring, But powerful as the poison-drop, once sped, That creeps, corrupts, and leaves its victim--dead!