Trade Winds.

The Trades are always loyal,
The Trades are always true.
Be ours the shaking royal
Or thrusting crank and screw,
To hear the warm winds singing
Across the white-capped sea
Is like a love-kiss bringing
Content to you and me.

In palm trees down at Santa
In the New Hebrides,
Off lonely Palaranta,
They're saying words like these,
“On! on! Be swift! Be ready!”
Yet when the night has come
The Trades, so true and steady
Will bring the tired ships home.

The stiff-bowed steamers meet them
With white spray flung afar.
The island schooners greet them,
Such lovers as they are,
So hot in headless onset,
So gentle when they blow
Into the red-rayed sunset
To fan its dying glow.

Their songs are never ended—
As though they understand,
From haunts by sun befriended
They come, hand over hand,
To cheer the gasping oilers
Beneath the hot decks bound,
To roar ‘neath laden boilers
And blow the turbines round.

The lovers hear the wireless,
The firemen in the waist,
Know naught so kind and tireless
So linked with little haste;
By bold Cape Grafton turning,
They'll rest in Mission Bay;
Where Venus light is burning
At dawn they'll be away.

They bid the white days waken,
Ere Dawn has shyly stirred.
In jibs and tops'ls shaken
They shout a joyful word.
Maybe in the Marquesas,
Maybe off Pago's peaks,
As Day, Night's spell releases
The eager Trade Wind speaks.

The Trades are always blowing
For God has made it so,
To help the sailors going
Wherever they must go.
And oh! the Trade Wind singing
To palm or white-capped sea
Is like a home song, bringing
A benison to me.

—Will Lawson
(Press Club, Sydney).

* * *

The Iron Horse.

He stands big-shouldered and august,
This genius of Wanderlust.
His mane now blue, now gray, now white,
And streaked and freckled with fire at night.
His glance, a mile-long broom, avails
To sweep the darkness off the rails.
Behind him, knocking at his heels,
A row of cars, a town on wheels.
He has his trysts with buttes and mines,
With streams and shacks within the pines.
Far hills, half substance and half air,
Reset themselves to meet him there.
And he is coming to his own
In cities chiseled out of stone.
What horse has borne as great a pack
Of civilization on his back?

—J. R. Hastings.

* * *

Little Miss Muffet.

Perhaps I may be justified in claiming your attention
If you're interested in fiction of a legendary kind.
My recital has a quality of whimsical invention
Which has always proved attractive to the adolescent mind.
You must picture then if possible a rural situation
(It's a thing you may have witnessed on the cinematograph)
And a heroine belonging to the younger generation—
For her age is in the neighbourhood of seven and a half
You will find, if you subject her to a close examination,
That the thing she is devoting her attention to is food.
On an elevated piece of graminosal vegetation
She's supported in a rather semisupine attitude.
She is nourishing the tissues of a healthy constitution
By the rapid deglutition and conversion into chyme
Of the mixture of an albumin in aqueous solution
With a renninised coagulum of caseinate of lime.
It was thus she was accosted by an appropinquent creature:
(In the order of Arachnida he's generally placed.)
Though of friendly disposition his repulsiveness of feature
Made her vanish from the scene with some considerable haste.
For the rest of her existence this obession terrified her,
Her descendants have inherited a tendency that way,
And perhaps it is the reason why the harmless little spider
Has so prevalent a horror for the woman of to-day.

—R.G.P.

“Wagon Wheels.”

Railwaymen particularly, will be interested in the latest song success, “Wagon Wheels,” which is the big hit of the moving picture of the same title. It has been suggested that this melody, with its intriguing rhythmic strain, might well become a theme song of the railroad track. There is something irresistibly appealing about the tune. The words are by Bill Hill (the writer of “The Last Round-Up” and the “Old Spinning Wheel”) and the music by Peter de Rose. J. Albert and Son (N.Z. office, 4 Willis Street, Wellington) are the publishers. The price is 2/-.