Them vile Savoyards! they lost him once before all along of following a monkey and an organ; O my Billy-my head will turn right round-if he's got kiddynapped with them Italians, They'll make him a plaster parish image boy, they will, the outlandish tatterdemalions. Billy-where are you, Billy?—I'm as hoarse as a crow, with screaming for ye, you young sorrow! And sha'n't have half a voice, no more I sha'n't, for crying fresh herrings to-morrow. O Billy, you're bursting my heart in two, and my life won't be of no more vally, If I'm to see other folks' darlin's, and none of mine, playing like angels in our alley! And what shall I do but cry out my eyes, when I looks at the old three-legged chair As Billy used to make coach and horses of, and there ain't no Billy there! I would run all the wide world over to find him, if I only knowed where to run; Little Murphy, now I remember, was once lost for a month through stealing a penny bun,— The Lord forbid of any child of mine! I think it would kill me raily To find my Bill holdin' up his little innocent hand at the Old Bailey. For though I say it as oughtn't, yet I will say, you may search for miles and mileses And not find one better brought up, and more pretty behaved, from one end to t'other of St. Giles's. And if I called him a beauty, it's no lie, but only as a mother ought to speak; You never set eyes on a more handsomer face, only it hasn't been washed for a week; As for hair, though it's red, it's the most nicest hair when I've time to just show it the comb; I'll owe 'em five pounds, and a blessing besides, as will only bring him safe and sound home. He's blue eyes, and not to be called a squint, though a little cast he's certainly got; And his nose is still a good un, though the bridge is broke, by his falling on a pewter pint pot; He's got the most elegant wide mouth in the world, and very large teeth for his age; And quite as fit as Mrs. Murdockson's child to play Cupid on the Drury Lane Stage. And then he has got such dear winning ways-but oh, I never, never shall see him no more! Oh dear! to think of losing him just after nussing him back from death's door! Only the very last month when the windfalls, hang 'em, was at twenty a penny, And the threepence he'd got by grottoing was spent in plums, and sixty for a child is too many. And the Cholera man came and whitewashed us all, and, drat him, made a seize of our hog. It's no use to send the crier to cry him about, he's such a blunderin' drunken old dog; The last time he was fetched to find a lost child, he was guzzling with his bell at the Crown, And went and cried a boy instead of a girl, for a distracted mother and father about town. Billy-where are you, Billy, I say? come, Billy, come home to your best of mothers! I'm scared when I think of them cabroleys, they drive so, they'd run over their own sisters and brothers. Or may be he's stole by some chimbly sweeping wretch, to stick fast in narrow flues and what not, And be poked up behind with a picked pointed pole, when the soot has ketched, and the chimbly's red hot. Oh, I'd give the whole wide world, if the world was mine, to clap my two longin' eyes on his face, For he's my darlin' of darlin's, and if he don't soon come back, you'll see me drop stone dead on the place. I only wish I'd got him safe in these two motherly arms, and wouldn't I hug him and kiss him! Lawk! I never knew what a precious he was,—but a child don't not feel like a child till you miss him. Why there he is! Punch and Judy hunting, the young wretch, it's that Billy as sartin as sin! But let me get him home, with a good grip of his hair, and I'm blest if he shall have a whole bone in his skin! ACROSS THE RIVER.-LUCY LARCOM. When for me the silent oar Parts the Silent River, And I stand upon the shore Of the strange Forever, Shall I miss the loved and known? Shall I vainly seek mine own? Mid the crowd that come to meet Listening to their echoing feet Down the streets of heaven,— That I listen, wait for, here? Then will one approach the brink, One whose thoughts I loved to think Saying, "Welcome! we have died, Saying, "I will go with thee, Can the bonds that make us here I shall love the angels well, Step by step our feet must go Shall we have a song to learn? He who on our earthly path Therefore dread I not to go Where mine own have gone before. AN ORDER FOR A PICTURE.-ALICE CARY. O good painter, tell me true, Has your hand the cunning to draw Woods and cornfields, a little brown,- Low and little, and black and old, Perhaps you may have seen, some day, Out of a wilding, wayside bush. Listen closer. When you have done With woods and cornfields and grazing herds, A lady, the loveliest ever the sun Looked down upon, you must paint for me; The clear blue eyes, the tender smile, That all the rest may be thrown away. Two little urchins at her knee You must paint, sir; one like me, The other with a clearer brow, And the light of his adventurous eyes God knoweth if he be living now; He sailed in the good ship "Commodore,"- To bring us news, and she never came back. With my great-hearted brother on her deck: The time we stood at our mother's knee: Out in the fields one summer night Of the corn-leaves' rustling, and of the shade Of the high hills, stretching so still and far,-Loitering till after the low little light Of the candle shone through the open door, And over the haystack's pointed top, All of a tremble, and ready to drop, The first half-hour, the great yellow star, That we, with staring, ignorant eyes, Had often and often watched to see Propped and held in its place in the skies By the fork of a tall red mulberry tree, Which close in the edge of our flax-field grew, Dead at the top,-just one branch full Of leaves, notched round, and lined with wool, Over our heads, when we came to play The berries we gave her she wouldn't eat, At last we stood at our mother's knee. |