Over across the river the world's asleep to-night,
With mealie-leaves a-quiver and glow-worm lamps alight.

Hark to the jackals howling, and the tawny lion prowling,

And the old, grey wolf a-growling where the fire-brands are bright!

Look where the white road wanders away beneath the moon;

List where the leafage squanders its wealth of slumber-tune.

The drowsy Weed has sought me with dreams that the gods have taught me, Dreams that the Dacha's brought me-a drowsy, dreamy boon.

Am I asleep or waking?-I hardly know nor care,
Only the leaves are quaking up on the kopje there-
Fires are redly dying in huts where the men are lying,
And, over it all, the sighing of ghosts in the haunted air.

Come! let the glowing embers press down upon the bowl,
What boots it to remember the striving, and the toll
Of tears the gods require, of sacrificial fire,

They neither dream nor tire-and so, they hunt my soul.

But I am old and weary, have buried many a wife;
And winter-time is dreary, the winds as keen as a knife-
Never a soul comes nigh me, even the children fly me,
Only the Dacha's by me to lend me a grip on life.

Nama is long forgotten-Zushe the bride is flown—
The sons that I have begotten have taken wives of their own;
By day I list to the clatter of women's pots, and their chatter;
By night-but what does it matter?-my pipe and I are alone.

The huts of the kraal have vanished, caught up in a web of space,
And the sentry trees are banished from round about the place;
Through a belt of flame and fire, still hovering ever higher,
On wings that will never tire I circle the world apace.

Even our gods are dying, fading swiftly away,

And the White Man, peering and prying, teaches us how to pray—
The spirits have lost their power, the blood in our veins is sour,
And the goddess-queen of the hour is Dacha, the Weed, I say!

Dacha, the great Dream-Mother, taking men to her breast-
What should we want with other, when we can creep to rest
With soft, green leaves to hold us, and curling smoke to fold us-
But the white-faced teacher told us his God and his creed were best?

So let me turn to slumber, shutting out the sight

Of the ghost-trees none may number, and the silver moon's pale height-
Redly the fire's gleaming, and my brain with fancies teeming,

As I float to the Land of Dreaming on wings of the World's Delight.

Thomas Jefferson and To-morrow.

F

By FERGUS CRANE.

OR more than a century freedom and America have been associated in the minds of struggling peoples. Upon the outcome of the political evolution of these United States depends the most formidable struggle yet of a people to rule themselves. That outcome will determine incidentally the title of Thomas Jefferson to immortality. Each century has its own problems and each its own proper application of principles. To insist that the application made in the early years of the nineteenth century by the man who most clearly voiced American ideals in their infancy is the political need of the twentieth century is reactionary. To stand at the grave of Jefferson is not progress. But to discriminate between the principles. of a free society and the specific policies of the third President is to distinguish between the fundamental and the ephemeral elements of history.

That Jefferson himself knew the distinction was revealed in the epitaph he prescribed for his tomb at Monticello. Although he served his country as Secretary of State, as Governor of Virginia, as Minister to France, as Vice-President, as President and as the purchaser of the Louisiana territory, he would have none of these things written above his grave. For three achievements he wished to be known, and they were guarantees of civil, religious and intellectual freedom. And so he directed this inscription to mark his resting place:

"Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom and father of the University of Virginia.'

The twentieth century has opened with the promise of as vexing problems as those which were settled in the nineteenth. The problems are in a new form, but the principles of self-government are unchanged. The new problems demand solutions equally new, but those solutions must be sought in the light of the same principles, because human nature is fundamentally unaltered. To leave the country a better place to live in than they found it