13 OCTOBER 1928, Page 12

Poetry

Cottage Musk

Or in caprice or through neglect Gone is the Greengage, rusty-speck'd,

Gone the Red Sage that once bedecked Our garden alleys.

But most I miss the Musk, of yore That scented every cottage door And pathway of the labouring poor, —But sweetliest Sally's.

Hers was a life together lent

With it and its belonging scent—

God knows which way or why they went !— -But you may go where You will, and search the countryside

Where wavering clouds and waters glide— It died, the year that Sally died—

You'll find it nowhere.

Q.

Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch writes in a postscript : " I doubt

if a single plant of the old yellow scented Musk, so common

forty years ago, can be found anywhere in England."