Chapter II

Little Babette, with your eyes of jet,
Your midnight hair and your piquant chin,
Your lips whose odours of violet
Drive men to madness and saints to sin,--
I see you over the footlights' glare
Down in the pit 'mid the common mob,--
Your throat is burning, and brown, and bare,
You lean, and listen, and pulse, and throb;
The viols are dreaming between us two,
And my gilded crown is no make-believe,
I am more than an actor, dear, to you,
For you called me your king but yester eve,
And your heart is my golden coronet,
Little Babette.

LOW TIDE AT ST. ANDREWS

(NEW BRUNSWICK)

The long red flats stretch open to the sky, Breathing their moisture on the August air. The seaweeds cling with flesh-like fingers where The rocks give shelter that the sands deny; And wrapped in all her summer harmonies St. Andrews sleeps beside her sleeping seas.

The far-off shores swim blue and indistinct, Like half-lost memories of some old dream. The listless waves that catch each sunny gleam Are idling up the waterways land-linked, And, yellowing along the harbour's breast, The light is leaping shoreward from the west.

And naked-footed children, tripping down, Light with young laughter, daily come at eve To gather dulse and sea clams and then heave Their loads, returning laden to the town, Leaving a strange grey silence when they go,-- The silence of the sands when tides are low.

BEYOND THE BLUE