et a fighting man.—I nm, Sir, he., HIS FATHER.
" A funny thing about me is that whenever I am inn any strain ef any sort, my- mind invariably runs to some strange poem. In tl:c trenchea, before dawn, One words of Clough- ' Say not the struggle nought asaileth.
. . • • • • • In front, the sun climbs slow, bow slowly, But westward, look! the land ia bright! '—
recurred to any mind with unending persistency. In the night, resonant with crickets, it was a song I hind read in J. If. Fabre of the Fable of the Cigale and the Ant. When the moon shone it woo ' Annabel Lee,' and when, now and again. I could not help thinking of the futility of it all, it w-as some lines of some little- known author :—
' If this is as it ought to be, By God, I leave it unto Thee.'
In the aeroplane, first time, it was a poem of Catullus • Peninsularum, Sermio, insularnnique quaseunque•in liquentibus undis Marique iusto feet Neptunus uterque.'
I never could get away from Cntulins's greeting of Sermio. It is
ineradicably fixed for me to the green horn of Aboukir, jutting ant to the fabulously blue sea. Through the whiz of the propeller
tame ever the cry.— ' Pearl of islands, and all but islands,'
and ever I used to come down with Tennyson's words, which seemed full of the fallen columns of Canopus :— 'renderest of Roman poets Nineteen hundred years ago.'
The blatant twentietlecentury propeller seems to sing that song."
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