Part 4 (1/2)

Despairing, he cried, ”After all these years Is there naught but hatred and strife and tears?”

He found two waifs in an attic bare; -- A single crust was their meagre fare --

One strove to quiet the other's cries, And the love-light dawned in her famished eyes

As she kissed the child with a motherly air: ”I don't need mine, you can have my share.”

Then the angel knew that the earthly cross And the sorrow and shame were not wholly loss.

At dawn, when hushed was earth's busy hum And men looked not for their Christ to come,

From the attic poor to the palace grand, The King and the beggar went hand in hand.

The Night Cometh

Cometh the night. The wind falls low, The trees swing slowly to and fro: Around the church the headstones grey Cl.u.s.ter, like children strayed away But found again, and folded so.

No chiding look doth she bestow: If she is glad, they cannot know; If ill or well they spend their day, Cometh the night.

Singing or sad, intent they go; They do not see the shadows grow; ”There yet is time,” they lightly say, ”Before our work aside we lay”; Their task is but half-done, and lo!

Cometh the night.

In Due Season

If night should come and find me at my toil, When all Life's day I had, tho' faintly, wrought, And shallow furrows, cleft in stony soil Were all my labour: Shall I count it naught

If only one poor gleaner, weak of hand, Shall pick a scanty sheaf where I have sown?

”Nay, for of thee the Master doth demand Thy work: the harvest rests with Him alone.”

JOHN MCCRAE

An Essay in Character

by Sir Andrew Macphail

I. In Flanders Fields

”In Flanders Fields”, the piece of verse from which this little book takes its t.i.tle, first appeared in 'Punch' in the issue of December 8th, 1915. At the time I was living in Flanders at a convent in front of Locre, in shelter of Kemmel Hill, which lies seven miles south and slightly west of Ypres. The piece bore no signature, but it was unmistakably from the hand of John McCrae.

From this convent of women which was the headquarters of the 6th Canadian Field Ambulance, I wrote to John McCrae, who was then at Boulogne, accusing him of the authors.h.i.+p, and furnished him with evidence. From memory--since at the front one carries one book only--I quoted to him another piece of his own verse, ent.i.tled ”The Night Cometh”:

”Cometh the night. The wind falls low, The trees swing slowly to and fro; Around the church the headstones grey Cl.u.s.ter, like children stray'd away, But found again, and folded so.”