Treble lent the fish-horn's bray. Sweetly along the Salem road Of the fields so green and the sky so blue. "Here's Flud Oirson, fur his horrd horrt, "Hear me, neighbors!" at last he cried,- What is the shame that clothes the skin And hear a cry from a reeling deck! The hand of God and the face of the dead!" Then the wife of the skipper lost at sea TELLING THE BEES. And gave hira a cloak to hide him in, 8 Tarred and feathered and carried in a cart TELLING THE BEES.26 HERE is the place; right over the hill 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 barn's brown length, and the cattle-yard, There are the beehives ranged in the sun; Of the brook are her poor flowers, weed-o'errun, A year has gone, as the tortoise goes, And the same rose blows, and the same sun glows, There's the same sweet clover-smell in the breeze ; Tangles his wings of fire in the trees, I mind me how with a lover's care I brushed off the burrs, and smoothed my hair, 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 The sundown's blaze on her window-pane, 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, Went drearily singing the chore-girl small, Trembling, I listened: the summer sun For I knew she was telling the bees of one Then I said to myself, "My Mary weeps Haply her blind old grandsire sleeps The fret and the pain of his age away." But her dog whined low; on the doorway sill, The old man sat; and the chore-girl still And the song she was singing ever since "Stay at home, pretty bees, fly not hence! THE SYCAMORES. 323 THE SYCAMORES. In the outskirts of the village, One long century hath been numbered, Since the rustic Irish gleeman Broke for them the virgin mould. Deftly set to Celtic music, At his violin's sound they grew, Rise again, thou poor Hugh Tallant ! Pioneer of Erin's outcasts, With his fiddle and his pack; How he wrought with spade and fiddle, 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, And the bulging nets swept shoreward, When, among the jovial huskers, Songs of love and wailing lyke-wake, By the blazing hearths of winter, How the souls in Purgatory 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!" |