It is not because of his toils that I lament for the poor: we must all toil, or steal (howsoever we name our stealing), which is worse; no faithful workman finds his task a pastime. The poor is hungry and athirst; but for him also there is food and drink: he is heavy-laden and weary; but for him also the Heavens send sleep, and of the deepest; in his smoky cribs, a clear dewy haven of rest envelops him, and fitful glitterings of cloud-skirted dreams. But what I do mourn over is, that the lamp of his soul should go out; that no ray of heavenly, or even of earthly, knowledge should visit him; but only, in the haggard darkness, like two spectres, Fear and Indignation bear him company. Alas, while the body stands so broad and brawny, must the soul lie blinded, dwarfed, stupefied, almost annihilated!, Alas, was this too a Breath of God; bestowed in heaven, but on earth never to be unfolded!--That there should one Man die ignorant who had capacity for Knowledge, this I call a tragedy, were it to happen more than twenty times in the minute, as by some computations it does. The miserable fraction of Science which our united Mankind, in a wide universe of Nescience, has acquired, why is not this, with all diligence, imparted to all? [Illustration: THE VAMPIRE E. M. LILIEN (_Contemporary German illustrator_)] [Illustration: THE MAN WITH THE HOE JEAN FRANÇOIS MILLET (_French painter of peasant life, 1814-75_) ] Played Out (_From "Songs of the Dead End"_) BY PATRICK MACGILL (A young Irishman, called the "Navvy poet"; born 1890. From the age of twelve to twenty a farm laborer, ditch-digger and quarry-man. As this work goes to press, he is fighting with his regiment in Flanders) As a bullock falls in the crooked ruts, he fell when the day was o'er, The hunger gripping his stinted guts, his body shaken and sore. They pulled it out of the ditch in the dark, as a brute is pulled from its lair, The corpse of the navvy, stiff and stark, with the clay on its face and hair. In Christian lands, with calloused hands, he labored for others' good, In workshop and mill, ditchway and drill, earnest, eager, and rude; Unhappy and gaunt with worry and want, a food to the whims of fate, Hashing it out and booted about at the will of the goodly and great. To him was applied the scorpion lash, for him the gibe and the goad-- The roughcast fool of our moral wash, the rugous wretch of the road. Willing to crawl for a pittance small to the swine of the tinsel sty, Beggared and burst from the very first, he chooses the ditch to die-- ... Go, pick the dead from the sloughy bed, and hide him from mortal eye.