Pipes OPan at Zekesbury | Page 9

she bore,-- Her parents both a-bein' dead, and all her sisters gone?And married off, and her a-livin' there alone with John-- You might say jes' a-toilin' and a-slavin' out her life?Far a man 'at hadn't pride enough to git hisse'f a wife-- 'Less some one married Evaline, and packed her off some day!-- So I got to thinkin' of her--and it happened thataway.
BABYHOOD.
Heigh-ho! Babyhood! Tell me where you linger:?Let's toddle home again, for we have gone astray;?Take this eager hand of mine and lead me by the finger?Back to the Lotus lands of the far-away.
Turn back the leaves of life; don't read the story,--?Let's find the pictures, and fancy all the rest:--?We can fill the written pages with a brighter glory?Than Old Time, the story-teller, at his very best!
Turn to the brook, where the honeysuckle, tipping?O'er its vase of perfume spills it on the breeze,?And the bee and humming-bird in ecstacy are sipping?From the fairy flagons of the blooming locust trees.
Turn to the lane, where we used to "teeter-totter,"?Printing little foot-palms in the mellow mold,?Laughing at the lazy cattle wading in the water?Where the ripples dimple round the buttercups of gold:
Where the dusky turtle lies basking on the gravel?Of the sunny sandbar in the middle-tide,?And the ghostly dragonfly pauses in his travel?To rest like a blossom where the water-lily died.
Heigh-ho! Babyhood! Tell me where you linger:?Let's toddle home again, for we have gone astray;?Take this eager hand of mine and lead me by the finger?Back to the Lotus lands of the far-away.
THE DAYS GONE BY.
O the days gone by! O the days gone by!?The apples in the orchard, and the pathway through the rye; The chirrup of the robin, and the whistle of the quail?As he piped across the meadows sweet as any nightingale;?When the bloom was on the clover, and the blue was in the sky, And my happy heart brimmed over in the days gone by.
In the days gone by, when my naked feet were tripped?By the honey-suckle's tangles where the water-lilies dipped, And the ripples of the river lipped the moss along the brink Where the placid-eyed and lazy-footed cattle came to drink, And the tilting snipe stood fearless of the truant's wayward cry And the splashing of the swimmer, in the days gone by.
O the days gone by! O the days gone by!?The music of the laughing lip, the luster of the eye;?The childish faith in fairies, and Aladdin's magic ring-- The simple, soul-reposing, glad belief in everything,--?When life was like a story, holding neither sob nor sigh, In the golden olden glory of the days gone by.
MRS. MILLER
John B. McKinney, Attorney and Counselor at Law, as his sign read, was, for many reasons, a fortunate man. For many other reasons he was not. He was chiefly fortunate in being, as certain opponents often strove to witheringly designate him, "the son of his father," since that sound old gentleman was the wealthiest farmer in that section, with but one son and heir to, in time, supplant him in the role of "county god," and haply perpetuate the prouder title of "the biggest tax-payer on the assessment list." And this fact, too, fortunate as it would seem, was doubtless the indirect occasion of a liberal percentage of all John's misfortunes. From his earliest school-days in the little town, up to his tardy graduation from a distant college, the influence of his father's wealth invited his procrastination, humored its results, encouraged the laxity of his ambition, "and even now," as John used, in bitter irony, to put it, "it is aiding and abetting me in the ostensible practice of my chosen profession, a listless, aimless undetermined man of forty, and a confirmed bachelor at that!" At the utterance of this self-depreciating statement, John generally jerked his legs down from the top of his desk; and, rising and kicking his chair back to the wall, he would stump around his littered office till the manilla carpet steamed with dust. Then he would wildly break away, seeking refuge either in the open street, or in his room at the old-time tavern, The Eagle House, "where," he would say, "I have lodged and boarded, I do solemnly asseverate, for a long, unbroken, middle-aged eternity of ten years, and can yet assert, in the words of the more fortunately-dying Webster, that 'I still live!'"
Extravagantly satirical as he was at times, John had always an indefinable drollery about him that made him agreeable company to his friends, at least; and such an admiring friend he had constantly at hand in the person of Bert Haines. Both were Bohemians in natural tendency, and, though John was far in Bert's advance in point of age, he found the young man "just the kind of a fellow to have around;" while Bert, in turn, held his