One by one the ancient mariners, the old merchants, the famous and picturesque whaling-barks, have gone to their last port. At New Bedford, whence in the old days sailed 700 ships and 20,000 seamen, there is left the merest remnant of the days when whaling was a great industry. These stout ships and their hardy sailors carried the American flag into ports all over the world and into the ice-bound seas of the polar regions. This ship, the Charles W. Morgan, was built over seventy years ago.

SCRIBNER'S MAGAZINE

VOL. LX

NOVEMBER, 1916

NO. 5

A NOVEMBER NIGHT

By Sara Teasdale

THERE! See the line of lights,

And see,

A chain of stars down either side the street—
Why can't you lift the chain and give it to me,
A necklace for my throat? I'd twist it round
And you could play with it. You smile at me
As though I were a little dreamy child
Behind whose eyes the fairies live. . . .
The people on the street look up at us
All envious. We are a king and queen,
Our royal carriage is a motor-bus,
We watch our subjects with a haughty joy.
How still you are! Have you been hard at work
And are you tired to-night? It is so long
Since I have seen you-four whole days, I think.
My heart is crowded full of foolish thoughts
Like fragile flowers in an April meadow,
And I must give them to you, all of them,
Before they fade. The people I have met,
The play I saw, the trivial, shifting things
That loom too big or shrink too little, shadows
That hurry, gesturing along a wall,

Haunting or gay-and yet they all grow real
And take their proper size here in my heart

When you have seen them. ... There's the Plaza now,

A lake of light! To-night it almost seems

That all the lights are gathered in your eyes,

Drawn somehow toward you. See the open park

Lying below us with a million lamps

Scattered in wise disorder like the stars.

We look down on them as God must look down

On constellations floating under him

Tangled in clouds. . . . Come, then, and let us walk

Since we have reached the park. It is our garden,

All black and blossomless this winter night,

But we bring April with us, you and I;

We set the whole world on the trail of spring.

I think that every path we ever took

Has marked our footprints in mysterious fire,

Delicate gold that only fairies see.

When they wake up at dawn in hollow tree-trunks
Copyright, 1916, by Charles Scribner's Sons. All rights reserved.

And come out on the drowsy park, they look
Along the empty paths and say, "Oh, here

They went, and here, and here, and here! Come, see,
Here is their bench, take hands and let us dance

About it in a windy ring and make

A circle round it only they can cross

When they come back again!" . . . Look at the lake

Do you remember how we watched the swans

That night in late October, while they slept?

Swans must have stately dreams, I think. But now
The lake bears only thin reflected lights

That shake a little. How I long to take

One from the cold black water-new-made gold
To give you in your hand! And see, and see,
There is a star, deep in the lake, a star!
Oh, dimmer than a pearl-if you stoop down
Your hand could almost reach it up to me.

There was a new frail yellow moon to-night-
I wish you could have had it for a cup
With stars like dew to fill it to the brim.

How cold it is! Even the lights are cold;
They have put shawls of fog around them, see!
What if the air should grow so dimly white
That we would lose our way along the paths
Made new by walls of moving mist receding
The more we follow. . . . What a silver night!
That was our bench the time you said to me
The long new poem-but how different now,
How eerie with the curtain of the fog
Making it strange to all the friendly trees.

.

Here snipe and other shore birds of a dozen varieties appear in their appointed seasons.-Page 525.