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But as they fetched a walk one day,

They met a press-gang crew; And Sally she did faint away,

Whilst Ben he was brought to.

The boatswain swore with wicked words, Enough to shock a saint,

That though she did seem in a fit,

'Twas nothing but a feint.

"Come, girl," said he, "hold up your head,

He'll be as good as me;

For when your swain is in our boat,

A boatswain he will be."

So when they'd made their game of her

And taken off her elf,

She roused, and found she only was
A-coming to herself.

"And is he gone, and is he gone?"
She cried, and wept outright :

"Then I will to the water side, And see him out of sight."

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And her woe began to run afresh,
As if she'd said, Gee woe!

Says he, "They've only taken him
To the tender-ship, you see;"
"The tender-ship," cried Sally Brown,
"What a hard-ship that must be !

"O! would I were a mermaid now,
For then I'd follow him;

But, oh! I'm not a fish-woman,

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And so I cannot swim.

"Alas! I was not born beneath
The virgin and the scales,
So I must curse my cruel stars,

And walk about in Wales."

Now Ben had sailed to many a place
That's underneath the world;

But in two years the ship came home,
And all her sails were furled.

But when he called on Sally Brown,
To see how she got on,

He found she'd got another Ben,
Whose Christian name was John,

"O Sally Brown, O Sally Brown,
How could you serve me so?
I've met with many a breeze before,
But never such a blow!"

LEE FIFTH RDR.

- 16

Then reading on his 'bacco-box,
He heaved a heavy sigh,

And then began to eye his pipe,
And then to pipe his eye.

And then he tried to sing "All's well,"
But could not, though he tried ;
His head was turned and so he chewed
His pigtail till he died.

His death, which happened in his berth,
At forty-odd befell:

They went and told the sexton, and
The sexton tolled the bell.

THE SKY

BY JOHN RUSKIN

Ruskin was an English author. He was born in 1819 and died in 1900. He wrote "Modern Painters," "The Seven Lamps of Architecture," "The Stones of Venice," "Sesame and Lilies," and many other works on subjects of art and ethics. This selection is from "Modern Painters," his greatest work, which has opened the eyes of many people to the beauties of nature and of art.

It is a strange thing how little in general people know about the sky. It is the part of creation in which nature has done more for the sake of pleasing man, more for the sole and evident purpose of talking to him and teaching

him, than in any other of her works, and it is just the part in which we least attend to her.

There are not many of her other works in which some more material or essential purpose than the mere pleasing of man is not answered by every part of their organization; but every essential purpose of the sky might, so far as we know, be answered, if once in three days or thereabouts, a great ugly black rain cloud were brought up over the blue and everything well watered, and so all left blue again till next time, with perhaps a film of morning and evening mist for dew. And instead of this, there is not moment of any day of our lives when nature is not producing scene after scene, picture after picture, glory after glory, and working still upon such exquisite and constant principles of the most perfect beauty that it is quite certain it is all done for us and intended for our perpetual pleasure. And every man, wherever placed, however far from other sources of interest or of beauty, has this doing for him constantly.

The noblest scenes of the earth can be seen and known but by few; it is not intended that man should live always in the midst of them; he injures them by his presence, he ceases to feel them if he be always with them; but the sky is for all; bright as it is, it is not "too bright nor good, for human nature's daily food"; it is fitted in all its functions for the perpetual comfort and exalting of the heart, for the soothing it and purifying it from its dross and dust. Sometimes gentle, sometimes capricious, sometimes awful, never the same for two moments together; almost human in its passions, almost

spiritual in its tenderness, almost divine in its infinity, its appeal to what is immortal in us is as distinct as its ministry of chastisement or of blessing to what is mortal is essential. And yet we never attend to it, we never make it a subject of thought, but as it has to do with our animal sensations; we look upon all by which it speaks to us more clearly than to brutes, upon all which bears witness to the intention of the Supreme, that we are to receive more from the covering vault than the light and the dew which we share with the weed and the worm, only as a succession of meaningless and monotonous accidents, too common and too vain to be worthy of a moment of watchfulness, or a glance of admiration.

If in our moments of utter idleness and insipidity, we turn to the sky as a last resource, which of its phenomena do we speak of? One says it has been wet and another it has been windy and another it has been warm. Who, among the whole chattering crowd, can tell me of the forms and the precipices of the chain of tall white mountains that girded the horizon at noon yesterday? Who saw the narrow sunbeam that came out of the south, and smote upon their summits until they melted and moldered away in the dust of blue rain? Who saw the dance of the dead clouds when the sunlight left them last night, and the west wind blew them before it like withered leaves?

What are you doing in God's fair earth and task garden, where whoever is not working is begging or stealing?

- CARLYLE

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