prick the skin Death stays there. Like to that fell cruel shaft This slender rhyme was. Through the purple dark Straight home it sped, and into Wyndham's veins Its drop of sudden poison did distill. Now no sound was, save when a dry twig snapped And rustled softly down from branch to branch, Or on its pebbly shoals the meagre brook Made intermittent murmur.  “So, 't is he!”       Thus Wyndham breathing thickly, with his eyes Dilating in the darkness, “Darrell—he! I set my springe for other game than this; Of hare or rabbit dreamed I, not of wolf. His frequent visitations have of late Perplexed me; now the riddle reads itself.      A proper man, a very proper man! A fellow that burns Trinidado leaf And sends smoke through his nostril like a flue! A fop, a hanger-on of willing skirts—      A murrain on him! Would Elizabeth In some mad freak had clapped him in the Tower—      Ay, through the Traitor's Gate. Would he were dead. Within the year what worthy men have died, Persons of substance, civic ornaments, And here 's this gilt court-butterfly on wing! O thou most potent lightning in the cloud, Prick me this fellow from the face of earth! I would the Moors had got him in Algiers What time he harried them on land and sea, And done their will with scimitar or cord Or flame of fagot, and so made an end; Or that some shot from petronel or bow Had winged him in the folly of his flight. Well had it been if the Inquisitors, With rack and screw, had laid black claw on him!”       In days whose chronicle is writ in blood The richest ever flowed in English veins Some foul mischance in this sort might have been; For at dark Fortune's feet had Darrell flung In his youth's flower a daring gauntlet down. A beardless stripling, at that solemn hour When, breaking its frail filaments of clay, The mother's spirit soared invisible, The younger son, unhoused as well he knew, Had taken horse by night to London town, With right sore heart and nought else in his scrip But boyish hope to footing find at Court—      A page's place, belike, with some great lord, Or some small lord, that other proving shy Of merit that had not yet clipt its shell. Day after day, in weather foul or fair, With lackeys, hucksters, and the commoner sort, At Whitehall and Westminster he stood guard, Reading men's faces with most anxious eye. There the lords swarmed, some waspish and some bland, But none would pause at plucking of the sleeve To hearken to him, and the lad had died On London stones for lack of crust to gnaw But that he caught 

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