book, adding to its completeness, as they will add to the poet's reputation. Preceding 'The Dog Guard' we have the following, which perhaps is as characteristic as any of the preludes. It will be seen that the burden of this, as indeed of the whole book, is Western Australia:—
"'Nation of Sun and Sin,
Thy flowers and crimes are red,
And thy heart is sore within
While the glory crowns thy head.
Land of the songless birds,
What was thine ancient crime.
Burning through lapse of time
like a prophet's cursing words?
"'Aloes and Myrrh and tears
Mix In thy bitter wine:
Drink, while the cup is thine,
Drink, for the draught is sign
Of thy reign in coming years.'
"Mr. O'Reilly has done his work faithfully and well; he has given us in his book more than he promised us in the preface; and to-day, with his first poetical venture before the public, he has added another to the laurels he has already won in other fields."
New York Tribune.
"These songs are the most stirring tales of adventure imaginable, chiefly placed in Western Australia, a penal colony, which has received from the mother country only her shame and her crime.' The book is the very melodrama of poetry. . . . Mr. O'Reilly is a man whose career has been full of wild and varied adventure, and who has put these stirring scenes—all of which he saw, and part of which he was—into verse as spontaneous and unconventional as the life he describes. His rhymed tales are as exciting as ghost stories, and we have been reading them while the early sullen November night closed in, with something the same feeling, the queer shiver of breathless expectation, with which we used to listen to legends of ghosts and goblins by our grandmother's firelight.
