haughty manner vanished, and he replied quite civilly,--"So you know
something about poetry, my little lad."

"To be sure, Sir," replied David Cobb, for such I afterwards found to be
his name. "How could a boy be two years at the Boston High School and
not know something about it? But I knew Drake's Address to the Flag, and
Pierpont's Pilgrim Fathers, and Percival's New England, when I was not
more than ten years old."

"Percival's New England!" said Clarendon, quite contemptuously. "Pray,
what could a poet say about such a puny subject as this Yankee land of
yours?"

"Do you not know that poem?" asked David; and we could see, by the
moonlight, that there was something very like indignation at such
ignorance in his fine dark eyes.

"Hear it, then, and see if you do not call it poetry."

If you could only have seen him, Bennie, as he stood on the cliff, with
his rough, sailor-like hat in hand, and the breeze lifting his dark hair
from his broad forehead, while, looking with absolute fondness on the
scene around him, he repeated,--

"Hail to the land whereon we tread,
Our fondest boast!
The sepulchre of mighty dead,
The truest hearts that ever bled,
Who sleep on glory's brightest bed,
A fearless host;