Marshall County Republican. (Plymouth, Ind.) 1856-1878, 1873-03-06
JOHN REEDS THOUGHTS.

JOHN REEDS THOUGHTS.
There's mist on the meadow below; the herring
frogs chirp and cry;
It's chill when the sun is DOM and the sod is not
yet dry;
The world is a lonely place, it seems, and don't
know why.
l see, as lean on the fence, how YEARLY trudges
With the feel of the Spring in his bones like weak
and elderly man;
I've bad it many time, but we must work when we
can.
But day after day to toll and ever from sun to sun,
though up to the seasons front and nothing be left
Is ending twelve like clock and beginning again
at one
The frogs make sorrowful noise, and yet it's the
time they mate;
There's something comes with the Spring, a light
ness or else weight;
There's something comes with the Spring, and it
seems to me it's fate.
It's the laundering after life that YOU never have
learned to know;
It's the discomfort with life that always thus and
It's the wondering that we are and where we are
going to go.
Ny life is lucky enough fancy, to most mems eyes,
dies,
And it's now run on SO long, it couldn't be other
wise.
And sister Jane and myself have learned to claim
and yield;
She rules in the house at WILL and in the barn and
ield
So, nigh upon thirty years las if written and
couldn't change if I would; I've lost the how and
the when;
One day my time will be up, and Jane be the mis-
tress then,
For single women tough, and live down the sin
gle men.
She kept me so to herself, she was always the
stronger hand,
And my lot showed well enough, when / looked
around in the land;
But I'm tired and sore at the heart and don't quite
understand.
wonder how it had been if I'd taken what others
The plague they say, wife, the care of younger
breed?
If Edith Pleasanton now were near me as Edith
Reed?
Suppose that well grown were there in the
place of Dan,
And felt myself in him, as was when my work
began?
1 should feel no older, sure, and certainly more
mani
daughter, besides, in the house; nay let there be
two or three!
We never can overdo the luck that can never be,
And what has come to the most might also have
come to me.
I've thought, when a neighbor's wife or his child
was carried away,
That to have no less was gain; but now-I
hardly say;
He to possess them STILL under the ridges of
clay.
Aid share and share in life is, somehow, differ
ent thing
From property held by deed and the riches that oft
take wing;
feel close in the breast II think must be the
Spring.
I'm drying up like brook when the woods have been
cleared around;
You're it must always run, you used to the
sight and sound,
But it shrnks until there's only left stony in
the ground.
There's nothing to do but take the days as they
come and go,
And not worry with thoughts that nobody likes to
show,
For people seldom talk of the things they want to
know.
There's times when the way is plain, and everything
nearly right,
And then of a sudden you stand like man with
clouded sight;
bush seems often beast in the dusk of falling
night.
must move; my joints are stiff the weather IS
breeding rain,
And Dan is hurrying on with his plow-team up 10
the lane.
I'll go the village store I'd rather talk with
Jane.
-Bayard Taylor, in the Atlantic for March.