The life of the beggar is almost spent, All day by the road hath the beggar sat, In silence, patiently holding his hat, As with cruel jest and greeting grim To himself the blind old man doth hum On his threadbare knee, keeping time; He starts and grasps with a hurried hand Then layeth it down again; While his black little spaniel, beautiful Spring, That he keeps at his buttonhole with a string, Jumps up, and his bell goes ting-a-ling! ling! As he yelps at the idle train. He sits by the great high road all day, The beggar blind and old; The locks on his brow are thin and gray, And his lips are blue and cold; THE WASHERWOMAN. Yet he murmureth never, day nor night, C. G. EASTMAN. THE WASHERWOMAN. AT the north end of our village stands, A weather-beaten house,-I've stopt To see the strip of bleaching grass The clumsy bench beside the door, Where poor old Rachel used to stand, Her blue-checked apron speckled with She never took her sunburnt arms We used to say 'twas weary work 131 With sleeves stretched straight upon the The washed shirts used to lie; By dozens I have counted them Some days, as I went by. The burly blacksmith battering at And when the sharp and ringing strokes As crooked as old Rachel's back, He used to say 'twould do. And every village housewife, with Her hair beneath her cotton cap Yet patiently she kept at work,- The smile about her sunken mouth Nobody ever thought the spark grass THE BRICKMAKER. And though a tender flush sometimes At last she left her heaps of clothes And stript from off her sunburnt arms That night within her moonlit door Sunk in her hand, her eyes shut up, Her face uplifted to the star That stood so sweet and low Against old crazy Peter's house(He loved her long ago!) Her heart had worn her body to In marriage-robes, I trust. THE BRICKMAKER. I. LET the blinded horse go round ALICE CARY. 133 In no stately structures skilled, Long, and dark, and smothered aisles :- Now thrust in the fettered fire- But his chains at last shall sever; Springeth up again, they say; Then, when this shall break asunder, And the fire be freed from under, Tell us what imperial thing From the ruin shall upspring? There shall grow a stately building, Blazing through its pillared halls. In those chambers, stern and dreaded, |