VERSES

Evening Star, Issue 22252, 1 February 1936, Page 8

VERSES

KIPUNfi Outside the sound of desultory strife, A football punted by a sea-damp park; Within a schoolboy ballad brought to life , 1 ¥nder the printer’s hand as deft and dark As Xim’s. They race the astigmatic eye As hares. He breathes the ooze of printer’s ink. The discus waits besmeared with devil’s dye. (The formes are set. A beetle? Yet I think Within that straitened armoury there lurks The father to the man who praised God’s works. A red road thirsting for the dallying rain: A ’rickshaw flitting by a deodar; A Baboo with a ticket for the train ; A trellised shrine, a polyglot bazaar All in a fever with the din of doing; The grunt of camels, and the punkah’s kiss That seems to tell of Cleopatra’s wooing. He serves the Press, his Dagon, or his Dis: Of Ormuz and of Ind a coloured screed, And all the world beside for him to read. A deep-set orchard by the dimpled Downs; A hunter home; a skipper done with sail; With word of Cresar’s men and far-off towns For wide-eyed children who bespeak a tale. like him who came to England with St. George, And loved his Stratford, this our scribe has driven His landmark by the plot of Weyland’s forge. Where Englishmen throughout the years have striven. He sang the lotus, but his Sussex knows How in his heart of hearts he sang the rose. —C. R. Allen (Dunedin). THE WAY THROUGH THE WOODS They shut the road through the w'oods Seventy years ago. .Weather and rain have undone it again, And now you would never know There was once a road through the woods Before they planted the trees. It is underneath the coppice and heath, And the thin anemones. Only the keeper sees That, where the ring-dove broods, And the badgers roll at ease, There was once a road through the woods. Yet, if you enter the woods Of a summer evening late, .When the night-air cools on the troutringed pools Where the otter whistles his mate (They fear not men in the woods Because they see so few). You will hear the beat of a horse’s feet And the swish of a skirt in the dew, Steadily cantex-ing through The misty solitudes, As though they perfectly knew The old lost road through the ■woods . . . But there is no road through the woods. —Rudyard Kipling. PICKWICK BREVITIES Preparations are being made for the adequate celebrations by Dickensians in london of the centenary of the publication of the ‘ Pickwick Papers.’ The Pickwick Centenary number of the ■* Dickensian ’ contains the following brevities ” : The ‘ Pickwick Papers’ first appeared on March 31, 1836. Dickens was then 24. They were published in 19 monthly numbers, price one shilling. Dickens agreed to the payment of 14 guineas each number, an “ emolument too tempting to resist.’’ so he wrote his future wife. Dickens drew £29 in advance on March 29, and was married four days later. It is estimated that the profit accruing to the publishers in the first three years was £14,000. Only 400 copies were sold of the first number: after about six months the sales increased enormously, and Dickens’s payment was increased to £25 per number. At the end of the first year the publishers entertained l Dickens to dinner and presented him with £SOO. On the completion of the publication, another dinner was held in celebration, and Dickens received a further cheque for £750. In all. Dickens received about £3,000 for this work, as against the original bargain for £2BO. There are no fewer than 360 characters in the * Pickwick Papers,’ and 22 inns are mentioned by name. The first foreign translation appeared in Paris in 1838. A few years ago. says the journal of the National Institute of Industrial Psychology, a very readable historical work became a best seller, and one large library found it necessary to stock some 30 to 40 copies of the volume, which was in, constant demand for many weeks. It occurred to a librarian of inquiring and scientific mind to place a spot of gum on every fiftieth page of every copy and to record the number of times a volume was returned to the library with the pages separated. The facts elicited were found to sup-