Page:The Seven Seas (Kipling, 1896).djvu/147

Rh But a rival, of Solutré, told the tribe my style was outré—

'Neath a hammer, grooved of dolomite, he fell.

And I left my views on Art, barbed and tanged, below the heart

Of a mammothistic etcher at Grenelle.

Then I stripped them, scalp from skull, and my hunting dogs fed full,

And their teeth I threaded neatly on a thong;

And I wiped my mouth and said, 'It is well that they are dead,

For I know my work is right and theirs was wrong.'

But my Totem saw the shame; from his ridgepole shrine he came,

And he told me in a vision of the night:—

'There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,

And every single one of them is right!'