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Treble lent the fish-horn's bray.
Sea-worn grandsires, cripple-bound,
Hulks of old sailors run aground,
Shook head, and fist, and hat, and cane,
And cracked with curses the hoarse refrain:
"Here's Flud Oirson, fur his horrd horrt,
Torr'd an' futherr'd an' corr'd in a corrt
By the women o' Morble'ead!”

Sweetly along the Salem road
Bloom of orchard and lilac showed.
Little the wicked skipper knew

Of the fields so green and the sky so blue.
Riding there in his sorry trim,
Like an Indian idol glum and grim,
Scarcely he seemed the sound to hear
Of voices shouting far and near:

"Here's Flud Oirson, fur his horrd horrt,
Torr'd an' futherr'd an' corr'd in a corrt
By the women o' Morble'ead!”

"Hear me, neighbors!" at last he cried,-
"What to me is this noisy ride ?

What is the shame that clothes the skin
To the nameless horror that lives within?
Waking or sleeping, I see a wreck,

And hear a cry from a reeling deck!
Hate me and curse me,-I only dread

The hand of God and the face of the dead!"
Said old Floyd Ireson, for his hard heart,
Tarred and feathered and carried in a cart
By the women of Marblehead!

Then the wife of the skipper lost at sea
Said, "God has touched him!—why should we?
Said an old wife mourning her only son,
"Cut the rogue's tether and let him run!"
So with soft relentings and rude excuse,
Half scorn, half pity, they cut him loose,

TELLING THE BEES.

And gave hira a cloak to hide him in,
And left him alone with his shame and sin.
Poor Floyd Ireson, for his hard heart,

8

Tarred and feathered and carried in a cart
By the women of Marblehead!

TELLING THE BEES.26

HERE is the place; right over the hill
Runs the path I took;

You can see the gap in the old wall still,

And the stepping-stones in the shallow brook.

There is the house, with the gate red-barred,
And the poplars tall

And the barn's brown length, and the cattle-yard,
And the white horns tossing above the wall.

There are the beehives ranged in the sun;
And down by the brink

Of the brook are her poor flowers, weed-o'errun,
Pansy and daffodil, rose and pink.

A year has gone, as the tortoise goes,
Heavy and slow;

And the same rose blows, and the same sun glows,
And the same brook sings of a year ago.

There's the same sweet clover-smell in the breeze ;
And the June sun warm

Tangles his wings of fire in the trees,
Setting, as then, over Fernside farm.

I mind me how with a lover's care
From my Sunday coat

I brushed off the burrs, and smoothed my hair,
And cooled at the brook-side my brow and throat.

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Since we parted, a month had passed,

To love, a year;

Down through the beeches I looked at last

On the little red gate and the well-sweep near.

I can see it all now,-the slantwise rain
Of light through the leaves,

The sundown's blaze on her window-pane,
The bloom of her roses under the eaves.

Just the same as a month before,

The house and the trees,

The barn's brown gable, the vine by the door,Nothing changed but the hives of bees.

Before them, under the garden wall,
Forward and back,

Went drearily singing the chore-girl small,
Draping each hive with a shred of black.

Trembling, I listened: the summer sun
Had the chill of snow;

For I knew she was telling the bees of one
Gone on the journey we all must go!

Then I said to myself, "My Mary weeps
For the dead to-day :

Haply her blind old grandsire sleeps

The fret and the pain of his age away."

But her dog whined low; on the doorway sill,
With his cane to his chin,

The old man sat; and the chore-girl still
Sung to the bees stealing out and in.

And the song she was singing ever since
In my ear sounds on :-

"Stay at home, pretty bees, fly not hence!
Mistress Mary is dead and gone!"

THE SYCAMORES.

323

THE SYCAMORES.

In the outskirts of the village,
On the river's winding shores,
Stand the Occidental plane-trees,
Stand the ancient sycamores.

One long century hath been numbered,
And another half-way told,

Since the rustic Irish gleeman

Broke for them the virgin mould.

Deftly set to Celtic music,

At his violin's sound they grew,
Through the moonlit eves of summer,
Making Amphion's fable true.

Rise again, thou poor Hugh Tallant !
Pass in jerkin green along,
With thy eyes brimful of laughter,
And thy mouth as full of song.

Pioneer of Erin's outcasts,

With his fiddle and his pack;
Little dreamed the village Saxons
Of the myriads at his back.

How he wrought with spade and fiddle,
Delved by day and sang by night,
With a hand that never wearied,

And a heart forever light,—

Still the gay tradition mingles

With a record grave and drear,

Like the rolic air of Cluny,

With the solemn march of Mear.

When the box-tree, white with blossoms,
Made the sweet May woodlands glad,
And the Aronia by the river
Lighted up the swarming shad,

And the bulging nets swept shoreward,
With their silver-sided haul,
Midst the shouts of dripping fishers,
He was merriest of them all.

When, among the jovial huskers,
Love stole in at Labor's side
With the lusty airs of England,
Soft his Celtic measures vied.

Songs of love and wailing lyke-wake,
And the merry fair's carouse;
Of the wild Red Fox of Erin
And the Woman of Three Cows,

By the blazing hearths of winter,
Pleasant seemed his simple tales,
Midst the grimmer Yorkshire legends
And the mountain myths of Wales.

How the souls in Purgatory
Scrambled up from fate forlorn,
On St. Keven's sackcloth ladder,
Slyly hitched to Satan's horn.

Of the fiddler who at Tara

Played all night to ghosts of kings; Of the brown dwarfs, and the fairies Dancing in their moorland rings!

Jolliest of our birds of singing,

Best he loved the Bob-o-link.

"Hush!" he'd say, "the tipsy fairies! Hear the little folks in drink!"

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