HERE’S a funny sort of story of an Isle beyond the sun,
Of a gleaming golden island seldom seen by anyone;
So prick your ears and listen to my most eccentric lays
Of the Island and the Zagabog from old pre-Cambrian days—
The mild and humble Zagabog,
The plain, good-hearted Zagabog
With prehistoric ways.
Upon his wondrous head he wore a rather ugly crown;
His eyes were green and somewhat sad, his tail hung meekly down;
But on a throne of early mud he comfortably sat
And ruled his Golden Island in a way I marvel at.
He was a peaceful Zagabog,
A practical old Zagabog,
And quite unique at that.
For Nature only made but one, though we shall never know
Why just a single Zagabog exhausted Nature so;
His subjects rose from trilobites, the newest of the new,
To other bygone beasts that leapt and swam and crawled and flew;
But all obeyed the Zagabog,
The good primeval Zagabog.
Which they were right to do.
From periods ante-Primary he dated, as we know,
And with the greatest interest observed that wondrous show
Of shells and fish, of monstrous newts, of dragons on the wing;
Then chronicled the changes that the rolling ages bring,—
That scientific Zagabog,
That most observant Zagabog;
And he loved everything.
Some twenty million years passed by and all the Isle went well;
Great palms grew on the mountain-tops; huge ferns adorned the dell;
And everywhere vast reptiles took their Mesozoic ease,
And ate each other frequently, with snap and snarl and sneeze;
But their beloved Zagabog,
Their wise and wakeful Zagabog,
They always tried to please.
For in those Secondary times, when monsters had their day,
Triassic and Jurassic giants about his feet would play;
And through the air there sometimes came the Archæopteryx—
A funny sort of feathered thing where bird and dragon mix.
“Your fossil,” said the Zagabog,
The humour-loving Zagabog,
“Will put them in a fix.”
He made no laws, he made no fuss; he just sat on his throne
With a genial simplicity peculiarly his own.
The Plesiosaur, the Teleosaur, the Early Crocodile,
The weird Cretaceous ocean-folk, who never, never smile—
All worshipped the old Zagabog,
The quaint, benignant Zagabog
Of that enchanted Isle.