And the foolish bard, instead

Of responding, only read

A verse that wasn't bad upon the whole.
And it pleased the cat so greatly,

Though she knew not what it meant,
That I'll quote approximately

How it went:

"If I should live to be

The last leaf upon the tree "—

(I might put in: "I think I'd just as leaf!") "Let them smile, as I do now,

At the old forsaken bough "

Well, he'd plagiarized it bodily, in brief!

But that cat of simple breeding

Couldn't read the lines between,

So she took it to a leading

Magazine.

She was jarred and very sore

When they showed her to the door.

(I might hit off the door that was a jar!) To the spot she swift returned

Where the poet sighed and yearned,

And she told him that he'd gone a little far. "Your performance with this rhyme has

Made me absolutely sick,'

She remarked. "I think the time has

Come to kick!"

I could fill up half the page
With descriptions of her rage-

(I might say that she went a bit too fur!)
When he smiled and murmured: "Shoo!"
"There is one thing I can do!"

She answered with a wrathful kind of purr. "You may shoo me, an' it suit you,

But I feel my conscience bid Me, as tit for tat, to boot you!" (Which she did.)

The Moral of the plot

(Though I say it, as should not!)

Is: An editor is difficult to suit.
But again there're other times
When the man who fashions rhymes
Is a rascal, and a bully one to boot!

H. H. Knibbs

Harry Herbert Knibbs was born at Niagara Falls, October 24, 1874. After a desultory schooling, he attended Harvard for three years when he was thirty-four. "Somebody said I took honors in English," says Knibbs, "but I never saw them." He wrote his first book, Lost Farm Camp, a novel, as a class exercise.

Half a dozen volumes followed, Overland Red (1914) and Tang of Life (1917) being the most popular. In 1911, Knibbs settled in Lost Angeles, California, where he has lived ever since.

In Riders of the Stars (1916) and Songs of the Trail (1920), Knibbs carries on the tradition of Bret Harte and the Pike

County Ballads. High-hearted verse this is, with more than an occasional flash of poetry. To the typical Western breeziness, Knibbs adds a wider whimsicality, a rough-shod but nimble imagination.

THE VALLEY THAT GOD FORGOT

Out in the desert spaces, edged by a hazy blue,
Davison sought the faces of the long-lost friends he knew:
They were there, in the distance dreaming
Their dreams that were worn and old;
They were there, to his frenzied seeming,
Still burrowing down for gold.

Davison's face was leather; his mouth was a swollen blot, His mind was a floating feather, in The Valley That God Forgot;

Wild as a dog gone loco,

Or sullen or meek, by turns,
He mumbled a Poco! Poco!"
And whispered of pools and ferns.

Gold! Why his, for the finding! But water was never found,

Save in deep caverns winding miles through the under

There was Shorty who owed him money, and Billing who bossed the crowd;

And Steve whom the boys called "Sunny," and Collins who talked so loud:

Miguel with the handsome daughter,

And the rustler, Ed McCray;
Five-and they begged for water,

And offered him gold, in pay.

Gold? It was never cheaper. And Davison shook his head:

The price of a drink is steeper out here than in town,"

he said.

He laughed as they mouthed and muttered
Through lips that were cracked and dried;
The pulse in his ear-drum fluttered:
"I'm through with the game!" he cried.

I'm through!" And he knelt and fumbled the

his dry canteen

Then, rising, he swayed and stumbled into a black ravine:

His ghostly comrades followed,

For Davison's end was near,

And a shallow grave they hollowed,

When up from it, cool and clear

Bubbled the water-hidden a pick-stroke beneath the

sand;

Davison, phantom-ridden, scooped with a shaking

hand

Davison swears they made it,
The Well where we drank to-day.
Davison's game? He played it

And won-so the town-folk say:

Called it, The Morning-Glory-near those abandoned stamps,

And Davison's crazy story was told in a hundred camps: Time and the times have tamed it,

His yarn-and this desert spot,

But I'm strong for the man who named it,
The Valley That God Forgot.

ROLL A ROCK DOWN

Oh, out in the West where the riders are ready,
They sing an old song and they tell an old tale,
And its moral is plain: Take it easy, go steady,
While riding a horse on the Malibu Trail.

It's a high, rocky trail with its switch-backs and doubles, It has no beginning and never an end:

It's risky and rough and it's plumb full of troubles, From Shifty-that's shale-up to Powder Cut Bend.

Old-timers will tell you the rangers who made it,

Sang "Roll A Rock Down," with a stiff upper lip, And cussed all creation, but managed to grade it; With a thousand-foot drop if a pony should slip.