Buy my English posies! You that scorn the May, Won't you greet a friend from home Half the world away? Green against the draggled drift, Faint and frail and first-- Buy my Northern blood-root And I'll know where you were nursed: Robin down the logging-road whistles, Come to me!' Spring has found the maple-grove, the sap is running free; All the winds of Canada call the ploughing-rain. Take the flower and turn the hour, and kiss your love again! Buy my English posies! Here's to match your need-- Buy a tuft of royal heath, Buy a bunch of weed White as sand of Muysenberg Spun before the gale-- Buy my heath and lilies And I'll tell you whence you hail! Under hot Constantia broad the vineyards lie-- Throned and thorned the aching berg props the speckless sky-- Slow below the Wynberg firs trails the tilted wain-- Take the flower arid turn the hour, and kiss your love again! Buy my English posies! You that will not turn-- Buy my hot-wood clematis. Buy a frond o' fern Gathered where the Erskine leaps Down the road to Lorne-- Buy my Christmas creeper And I'll say where you were born! West away from Melbourne dust holidays begin-- They that mock at Paradise woo at Cora Lynn-- Through the great South Otway gums sings the great South Main-- Take the flower and turn the hour, and kiss your love again! Buy my English posies! Here's your choice unsold! Buy a blood-red myrtle-bloom, Buy the kowhai's gold Flung for gift on Taupo's face, Sign that spring is come-- Buy my clinging myrtle And I'll give you back your home! Broom behind the windy town; pollen o' the pine-- Bell-bird in the leafy deep where the _ratas_ twine-- Fern above the saddle-bow, flax upon the plain-- Take the flower and turn the hour, and kiss your love again! Buy my English posies! Ye that have your own, Buy them for a brother's sake Overseas, alone. Weed ye trample underfoot Floods his heart abrim-- Bird ye never heeded, Oh, she calls his dead to him! Far and far our homes are set round the Seven Seas; Woe for us if we forget, we that hold by these! Unto each his mother-beach, bloom and bird and land-- Masters of the Seven Seas, oh, love and understand. MUNICIPAL. "Why is my District death-rate low?" Said Binks of Hezabad. "Wells, drains, and sewage-outfalls are My own peculiar fad. I learnt a lesson once. It ran Thus," quoth that most veracious man:-- It was an August evening and, in snowy garments clad, I paid a round of visits in the lines of Hezabad; When, presently, my Waler saw, and did not like at all, A Commissariat elephant careering down the Mall.