From The Far West

Tis a song of the Never Never land     Set to the tune of a scorching gale     On the sandhills red,     When the grasses dead     Loudly rustle, and bow the head     To the breath of its dusty hail:     Where the cattle trample a dusty pad     Across the never-ending plain,     And come and go     With muttering low     In the time when the rivers cease to flow,     And the Drought King holds his reign;     When the fiercest piker who ever turned     With lowered head in defiance proud,     Grown gaunt and weak,     Release doth seek     In vain from the depths of the slimy creek     His sepulchre and his shroud;     His requiem sung by an insect host,     Born of the pestilential air,     That seethe and swarm     In hideous form     Where the stagnant waters lie thick and warm,     And Fever lurks in his lair:     Where a placid, thirst-provoking lake     Clear in the flashing sunlight lies     But the stockman knows     No water flows     Where the shifting mirage comes and goes     Like a spectral paradise;     And, crouched in the saltbush' sickly shade,     Murmurs to Heaven a piteous prayer:     O God! must I     Prepare to die?'     And, gazing up at the brazen sky,     Reads his death-warrant there.     Gaunt, slinking dingoes snap and snarl,     Watching his slowly-ebbing breath;     Crows are flying,     Hoarsely crying     Burial service o'er the dying     Foul harbingers of Death.     Full many a man has perished there,     Whose bones gleam white from the waste of sand     Who left no name     On the scroll of Fame,     Yet died in his tracks, as well became     A son of that desert land.