She served kind, gentle masters,
Nor asked for rest or change;

Her friends seemed no more new ones,

Their speech seemed no more strange; And when she led her cattle

To pasture every day,

She ceased to look and wonder
On which side Bregenz lay.

She spoke no more of Bregenz,
With longing and with tears;
Her Tyrol home seemed faded
In a deep mist of years;
She heeded not the rumors

Of Austrian war and strife;
Each day she rose contented,
To the calm toils of life.

Yet, when her master's children
Would clustering round her stand,
She sang them ancient ballads
Of her own native land;
And when at morn and evening
She knelt before God's throne,
The accents of her childhood
Rose to her lips alone.

And so she dwelt: the valley
More peaceful year by year;
When suddenly strange portents
Of some great deed seemed near.
The golden corn was bending
Upon its fragile stalk,

While farmers, heedless of their fields,
Paced up and down in talk.

The men seemed stern and altered,

With looks cast on the ground; With anxious faces, one by one,

The women gathered round;

All talk of flax, or spinning,

Or work, was put away;

The very children seemed afraid
To go alone to play.

One day, out in the meadow

With strangers from the town, Some secret plan discussing,

The men walked up and down. Yet now and then seemed watchirg A strange uncertain gleam,

That looked like lances 'mid the trees That stood below the stream.

At eve they all assembled,

Then care and doubt were fled; With jovial laugh they feasted; The board was nobly spread.

The elder of the village

Rose up, his glass in hand,
And cried, "We drink the downfall
Of an accursed land!

"The night is growing darker,
Ere one more day is flown,
Bregenz, our foemens' stronghold,
Bregenz shall be our own!"
The women shrank in terror
(Yet Pride, too, had her part),
But one poor Tyrol maiden

Felt death within her heart.

Before her stood fair Bregenz;

Once more her towers arose; What were the friends beside her? Only her country's foes!

The faces of her kinsfolk,

The days of childhood flown, The echoes of her mountains, Reclaimed her as their own.

Nothing she heard around her
(Though shouts rang forth again),
Gone were the green Swiss valleys,
The pasture, and the plain;
Before her eyes one vision,

And in her heart one cry,
That said, "Go forth, save Bregenz,
And then, if need be, die!"

With trembling haste and breathless, With noiseless step, she sped; Horses and weary cattle

Were standing in the shed;

She loosed the strong, white charger, That fed from out her hand,

She mounted, and she turned his head Toward her native land.

Out-out into the darkness

Faster, and still more fast;
The smooth grass flies behind her,

The chestnut wood is past;
She looks up; clouds are heavy;
Why is her steed so slcw?
Scarcely the wind beside them
Can pass them as they go.

"Faster!" she cries, "O faster!"
Eleven the church-bells chime:

"O God," she cries, "help Bregens,
And bring me there in time!"
But louder than bells' ringing,
Or lowing of the kine,
Grows nearer in the midnight
The rushing of the Rhine.

Shall not the roaring waters

Their headlong gallop check?

The steed draws back in terror,—
She leans upon his neck

.

To watch the flowing darkness;

The bank is high and steep;

One pause

--

-he staggers forward,

And plunges in the deep.

She strives to pierce the blackness,
And looser throws the rein;

Her steed must breast the waters

That dash above his mane.
How gallantly, how nobly,

He struggles through the foam,
And see- in the far distance
Shine out the lights of home!

Up the steep bank he bears er,
And now, they rush again
Towards the heights of Bregenz,
That tower above the plain.
They reach the gate of Bregenz
Just as the midnight rings,
And out come serf and soldier

To meet the news she brings.

Bregenz is saved! Ere daylight
Her battlements are manned;

Defiance greets the army

That marches on the land.

And if to deeds heroic

Should endless fame be paid,

Bregenz does well to honor

The noble Tyrol maid.

Three hundred years are vanished,

And yet upon the hill

An old stone gateway rises,

To do her honor still.

And there, when Bregenz women

Sit spinning in the shade,

They see in quaint old carving

The Charger and the Maid.

And when, to guard old Bregenz,
By gateway, street and tower,
The warder paces all night long
And calls each passing hour;

"Nine," "ten," “eleven," he cries aloud,
And then (O crown of Fame!)

When midnight pauses in the skies,

He calls the maiden's name!

Adelaide Procter

The Grandmother's Apology.

And Willy, my eldest born, is gone, you say, little Annie?
Ruddy and white, and strong on his legs, he looks like a man.
And Willy's wife has written: she never was overwise,
Never the wife for Willy: he wouldn't take my advice.

For, Annie, you see, her father was not the man to save;
Hadn't a head to manage, and drank himself into his grave.
Pretty enough, very pretty! but I was against it for one.
Eh!-but he wouldn't hear me - and Willy, you say, is gone.

Why do you look at me, Annie? you think I am hard and cold;
But all my children have gone before me, I am so old:

I cannot weep for Willy, nor can I weep for the rest;
Only at your age, Annie, I could have wept with the best.

For I remember a quarrel I had with your father, my dear,
All for a slanderous story, that cost me many a tear.
I mean your grandfather, Annie: it cost me a world of woe,
Seventy years ago, my darling, seventy years ago.

Willy had not been down to the farm for a week and a day;
And all things look'd half-dead, tho' it was the middle of May.
Jenny, to slander me, who knew what Jenny had been!
But soiling another, Annie, will never make oneself clean.

And I cried myself well-nigh blind, and all of an evening late climb'd to the top of the garth, and stood by the road at the gate The moon like a rick on fire was rising over the dale,

And whit, whit, whit, in the bush beside me, chirrupt the night

ingale.