Year: 1879

There's mist on the meadow below; the

 berring frogs chirp and cry; It's chill when the sun is down, and the sod is

 not yet dry; The world is lonely place, it seems, and

 don't know why.

 trudges Dan, With the feel of the spring in his bones, like a

 weak and elderly man; I've had 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 undone, Is ending at twelve like clock, and begin

 ming again at one. The frogs make sorrowful noise and yet it's

 the time they mate; There's something comes with the spring,

 a ightness or else weight; There's something comes with the spring, and

 it seems to me it's fate; It's the hankering after lite that you never

 have learned to know; It's the discontent with life that is always thus

 and so; It's the wondering what we are and where we

 are going to go. My life is lucky enough, I fancy, to most mons For the more family grows the oftener some one dies, And it's now run on so long, it couldn't be

 otherwise. And sister Jane and myself, we have learned to claim and yield; She rules in the house at will, and in the barr and field; So, nigh upon thirty years.-as if written and signed and sealed. I couldn't change if would I've lost the how and the when; One day my time will be up, and Jane be the mistress then, For single women are tough and live down the

 single men. She kept me so to herself, she was always the

 stronger hand, And my lot showed well enough, when l

 looked around in the land; But I'm tired and sore at heart, and don't

 quite understand. l wonder how it had been if I'd taken what

 others need, The plague, they say, of wife, the care of a

 younger breed? Ii EditiS Pleasanton now were near me as

 Edith Reed! Suppose that well grown were there in

 the place of Dan, And I felt myself in him, as I was when my sHnris lsss...s I should feel no older, sure, and certainly more A 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 neighbours wife or his

 child was carried away, That to have no loss was gain; but now-I

 can hardly say; He seems to possess them still, under the

 ridges ot clay. And share and share in lie is, somehow n

 different thing From property held by deed, and tie riches

 that oft take wing, feel so close in the breast-I think it must be

 the spring. I'm drying up like brook when the woods

 have been cleared around; You're sure it must always run, you are used

 to the sight and sound, But it shrinks till there's only left stony rut

 in the ground. There's nothing to do but to take the days as

 they come and go, And not to worry with thoughts that nobody

 likes to show For people so seldom talk Of the things they

 want to know. There's times when the way is plain, and

 everything nearly right, And then of sudden you stand like a man

 with a clouded sight; A bush seems often a beast in the dusk of a

 falling night. must move; my joints are stiff, the weather

 is breeding rain, And Dan is hurrying on, with his blow team

 up the lane; I'll go to the village store; I'd rather not talk

 with Jane.

 -Bayard Taylor.