Poets and Prophets of Past Time

Of all the poets that I have known, Rudyard Kipling seemed to be the most full of human sympathies. If any great trouble had come my way, Kipling is the man to whom I should have taken it. And another thing about him was that laughter always seemed near to the brim of his blue eyes, as though welling up from some kindly joke. One joke I remember at his lovely house in the valley at Burwash was one made by his father, or by him and his father together; it was a cocoanut with a simple verse carved on it, to all appearances by a shipwrecked sailor, cast away for quite a long time, saying:—