"A needless Salamander ends the line."

Out on the path of the blazing ball that has hurtled a million years,

Where the uttermost light glows red by night in the clash of the angry spheres,

Where never a tear-drop dims the eye, and sorrows are stifled young,

And the Anglo-Indians snigger and sneer with the jest of a bitter tongue.

Where the tribesmen mock at the Bengalee and shiver their spears in vain,

And officers steep their souls chin-deep in brandy and dry champagne;

Where the Rudyard river runs, flecked with foam, far forth to the Kipling seas,

And the maker of man takes walks abroad with Pagan deities.

Where AZRAEL talks to the Graces Three, and the Muses Nine stand by,

And ask Greek riddles of BUDDHA, who never makes reply.

(Gentlemen all and ladies too as smart as a brand-new pin),

And nobody wonders how on earth so mixed a lot got in—

Here in the track of a thunderbolt from the nethernmost smithy hurled,

With the groan of an ancient passion rent from the wreck of a shattered world,

In the white-hot pincers of BAAL borne through cycles of agony,

Lit by the Pit's red wrath there came the Soul of a Sundered Flea.

And all that company started back; first AZRAEL grimly smiled,

The smile that an East-End Coster smiles, by a stout policeman riled;

And BUDDHA made no remark at all, but nodded his heavy head,

Like a boy who has eaten too much dessert, and wants to be put to bed.

And the Muses Nine, as they stood in line, they shuddered and turned to go.

"A joke's a joke, but I can't bear fleas," said CLIO to ERATO.

And the Graces, the good Conservative Three, shrank back to a spot remote,

And observed that they knew that this would come from letting the Masses vote.

Then AZRAEL spake—"On the Stygian lake I floated a half-sinned sin

On the crest of a cross-grained stickleback, that is caught with a crooked pin;

For a year and a day I watched it whirl, but never that sin could be

One-half so base as your gruesome face, O Soul of a Sundered Flea!

"What ill have ye done? Speak up, speak up!—for this is no place, I trow,

For the puling people on virtue fed. So speak, or prepare to go."

But the Flea flew free from the pincers' grip, and uttered a single phrase—

"I have lived on blood, as a gentleman should, and that is my claim to praise."

Then a shout of joy from the throng went forth; they built him a crystal throne,

And there in his pride, with none beside, he rules and he reigns alone.

And this is the tale which I here set down, as the story was told to me—

In excellent Rudyard-Kipling verse—the tale of the Sundered Flea.