Moral Emblems | Page 4

better here to tarry
Apprentice
to the Apothecary.
The silent pirates of the shore
Eat and sleep soft,
and pocket more
Than any red, robustious ranger
Who picks his farthings hot from
danger.
You clank your guineas on the board;
Mine are with several
bankers stored.
You reckon riches on your digits,
You dash in chase
of Sals and Bridgets,
You drink and risk delirium tremens,
Your
whole estate a common seaman's!
Regard your friend and school
companion,
Soon to be wed to Miss Trevanion
(Smooth,
honourable, fat and flowery,
With Heaven knows how much land in
dowry),
Look at me--Am I in good case?
Look at my hands, look at
my face;
Look at the cloth of my apparel;
Try me and test me, lock
and barrel;
And own, to give the devil his due,
I have made more of
life than you.
Yet I nor sought nor risked a life;
I shudder at an open
knife;
The perilous seas I still avoided
And stuck to land whate'er
betided.

I had no gold, no marble quarry,
I was a poor apothecary,

Yet here I stand, at thirty-eight,
A man of an assured estate.'
'Well,' answered Robin--'well, and how?'
The smiling chemist tapped his brow.
'Rob,' he replied, 'this

throbbing brain
Still worked and hankered after gain.
By day and
night, to work my will,
It pounded like a powder mill;
And marking
how the world went round
A theory of theft it found.
Here is the
key to right and wrong:
STEAL LITTLE, BUT STEAL ALL DAY
LONG;
And this invaluable plan
Marks what is called the Honest
Man.
When first I served with Doctor Pill,
My hand was ever in the
till.
Now that I am myself a master,
My gains come softer still and
faster.
As thus: on Wednesday, a maid
Came to me in the way of
trade.
Her mother, an old farmer's wife,
Required a drug to save her
life.
'At once, my dear, at once,' I said,
Patted the child upon the
head,
Bade her be still a loving daughter,
And filled the bottle up
with water.'
'Well, and the mother?' Robin cried.
'O she!' said Ben--'I think she died.'
'Battle and blood, death and disease,
Upon the tainted Tropic seas -

The attendant sharks that chew the cud -
The abhorred scuppers
spouting blood -
The untended dead, the Tropic sun -
The thunder
of the murderous gun -
The cut-throat crew--the Captain's curse -

The tempest blustering worse and worse -
These have I known and
these can stand,
But you--I settle out of hand!'
Out flashed the cutlass, down went Ben
Dead and rotten, there and
then.
Poem: II--THE BUILDER'S DOOM
In eighteen-twenty Deacon Thin
Feu'd the land and fenced it in,

And laid his broad foundations down
About a furlong out of town.
Early and late the work went on.
The carts were toiling ere the dawn;

The mason whistled, the hodman sang;
Early and late the trowels
rang;
And Thin himself came day by day

To push the work in every

way.
An artful builder, patent king
Of all the local building ring,

Who was there like him in the quarter
For mortifying brick and
mortar,
Or pocketing the odd piastre
By substituting lath and plaster?

With plan and two-foot rule in hand,
He by the foreman took his
stand,
With boisterous voice, with eagle glance
To stamp upon
extravagance.
For thrift of bricks and greed of guilders,
He was the
Buonaparte of Builders.
The foreman, a desponding creature,
Demurred to here and there a
feature:
'For surely, sir--with your permeession -
Bricks here, sir, in
the main parteetion. . . . '
The builder goggled, gulped, and stared,

The foreman's services were spared.
Thin would not count among his
minions
A man of Wesleyan opinions.
'Money is money,' so he said.
'Crescents are crescents, trade is trade.

Pharaohs and emperors in their seasons
Built, I believe, for
different reasons -
Charity, glory, piety, pride -
To pay the men, to
please a bride,
To use their stone, to spite their neighbours,
Not for
a profit on their labours.
They built to edify or bewilder;
I build because I am a builder.

Crescent and street and square I build,
Plaster and paint and carve and
gild.
Around the city see them stand,
These triumphs of my shaping
hand,
With bulging walls, with sinking floors,
With shut,
impracticable doors,
Fickle and frail in every part,
And rotten to
their inmost heart.
There shall the simple tenant find
Death in the
falling window-blind,
Death in the pipe, death in the faucet,
Death
in the deadly water-closet!
A day is set for all to die:

Caveat emptor!
what care I?'
As to Amphion's tuneful kit
Thebes rose, with towers encircling it;

As to the Mage's brandished wand
A spiry palace clove the sand;

To Thin's indomitable financing,
That phantom crescent kept
advancing.
When first the brazen bells of churches
Called clerk and

parson to their perches,
The worshippers of every sect
Already
viewed it with respect;
A second Sunday had not gone
Before the
roof was rattled on:
And when the fourth was there, behold
The
crescent finished, painted, sold!
The stars proceeded in their courses,
Nature with her subversive
forces,
Time, too, the iron-toothed and sinewed,
And the edacious
years continued.
Thrones rose and fell; and still the crescent,

Unsanative and now senescent,
A plastered skeleton of lath,
Looked
forward to a day of wrath.
In the dead night, the groaning timber

Would jar upon the ear of slumber,
And, like Dodona's talking oak,

Of oracles and