Robed, crowned and throned, he wove his spell, Where heart-blood beat or hearth-smoke curled, With unconsidered miracle, Hedged in a backward-gazing world; Then taught his chosen bard to say: "The King was with us--yesterday!" THE RHYME OF THE THREE SEALERS. _Away by the lands of the Japanee, When the paper lanterns glow And the crews of all the shipping drink In the house of Blood Street Joe, At twilight, when the landward breeze Brings up the harbour noise, And ebb of Yokohama Bay Swigs chattering through the buoys, In Cisco's Dewdrop Dining Rooms They tell the tale anew Of a hidden sea and a hidden fight, When the Baltic ran from the Northern Light And the Stralsund fought the two!_ Now this is the Law of the Muscovite, that he proves with shot and steel, When ye come by his isles in the Smoky Sea ye must not take the seal, Where the gray sea goes nakedly between the weed-hung shelves, And the little blue fox he is bred for his skin and the seal they breed for themselves; For when the _matkas_ seek the shore to drop their pups aland, The great man-seal haul out of the sea, aroaring, band by band; And when the first September gales have slaked their rutting-wrath, The great man-seal haul back to the sea and no man knows their path. Then dark they lie and stark they lie--rookery, dune, and floe, And the Northern Lights come down o' nights to dance with the houseless snow. And God who clears the grounding berg and steers the grinding floe, He hears the cry of the little kit-fox and the lemming on the snow. But since our women must walk gay and money buys their gear, The sealing-boats they filch that way at hazard year by year. English they be and Japanee that hang on the Brown Bear's flank, And some be Scot, but the worst, God wot, and the boldest thieves, be Yank!