網頁圖片
PDF
ePub 版

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
Spirits sin-forgiven,—

Listening to their echoing feet

Down the streets of heaven,—
Shall I know a footstep rear

That I listen, wait for, here?

Then will one approach the brink,
With a hand extended?—

One whose thoughts I loved to think
Ere the veil was rended,

Saying, "Welcome! we have died,
And again are side by side.".

Saying, "I will go with thee,
That thou be not lonely,
To yon hills of mystery;
I have waited only
Until now to climb with thee
Yonder hills of mystery."

Can the bonds that make us here
Know ourselves immortal,
Drop away, the foliage sear,
At life's inner portal?
What is holiest below
Must forever live and grow.

I shall love the angels well,
After I have found them,
In the mansions where they dwell,
With the glory round them;
But at first, without surprise,
Let me look for human eyes.

Step by step our feet must go
Up the holy mountain;
Drop by drop within us flow
Life's unfailing fountain.
Angels sing with crowns that burn;

Shall we have a song to learn?

He who on our earthly path
Bids us help each other,-
Who his Well-beloved hath
Made our Elder Brother,--
Will but clasp the chain of love
Closer, when we meet above.

Therefore dread I not to go
O'er the Silent River;
Death, thy hastening oar I know:
Bear me, thou life-giver,
Through the waters, to the shore

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
Shapes of things that you never saw?
Ay? Well, here is an order for you.

Woods and cornfields, a little brown,-
The picture must not be over-bright,
Yet all in the golden and gracious light
Of a cloud, when the summer sun is down.
Alway and alway, night and morn,
Woods upon woods, with fields of corn
Lying between them, not quite sere,
And not in the full, thick, leafy bloom,
When the wind can hardly find breathing-room
Under their tassels, cattle near,
Biting shorter the short green grass,
And a hedge of sumach and sassafras,
With bluebirds twittering all around,-
(Ah, good painter, you can't paint sound!)
These, and the house where I was born,

Low and little, and black and old,
With children, many as it can hold,
All at the windows, open wide,-
Heads and shoulders clear outside,
And fair young faces all ablush:

Perhaps you may have seen, some day,
Roses crowding the self-same way,

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;
Oh, if I only could make you see

The clear blue eyes, the tender smile,
The sovereign sweetness, the gentle grace,
The woman's soul, and the angel's face
That are beaming on me all the while,
I need not speak these foolish words:
Yet one word tells you all I would say,-
She is my mother: you will agree

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
Flashing with boldest enterprise:
At ten years old he went to sea,-~

God knoweth if he be living now;

He sailed in the good ship "Commodore,"-
Nobody ever crossed her track

To bring us news, and she never came back.
Ah, 'tis twenty long years and more
Since that old ship went out of the bay

With my great-hearted brother on her deck:
I watched him till he shrank to a speck,
And his face was toward me all the way.
Bright his hair was, a golden brown,

The time we stood at our mother's knee:
That beauteous head, if it did go down,
Carried sunshine into the sea!

Out in the fields one summer night
We were together, half afraid

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,
From which it tenderly shook the dew

Over our heads, when we came to play
In its handbreadth of shadow, day after day.
Afraid to go home, sir; for one of us bore
A nest full of speckled and thin-shelled eggs;
The other, a bird, held fast by the legs,
Not so big as a straw of wheat:

The berries we gave her she wouldn't eat,
But cried and cried, till we held her bill,
So slim and shining, to keep her still.

At last we stood at our mother's knee.
Do you think, sir, if you try,
You can paint the look of a lie?
If you can, pray have the grace
To put it solely in the face
Of the urchin that is likest me:

« 上一頁繼續 »