And hear a cry from a reeling deck!
Hate me and curse me-I only dread

The hand of God and the face of the dead!"
Said old Floyd Ireson, for his hard heart
Tarred and feathered and carried in a cart

By the women of Marblehead!

Then the wife of the skipper lost at sea

Said, "God has touched him! why should we?"
Said an old wife mourning her only son,
"Cut the rogue's tether and let him run!"
So with soft relentings and rude excuse,
Half scorn, half pity, they cut him loose,
And gave him a cloak to hide him in,
And left him alone with his shame and sin.
Poor Floyd Ireson, for his hard heart
Tarred and feathered and carried in a cart
By the women of Marblehead!

1828, 1857.

TELLING THE BEES

Here is the place: right over the hill

Runs the path I took;

You can see the gap in the old wall still,

1857.

And the stepping-stones in the shallow brook.

There is the house, with the gate red-barred,

And the poplars tall;

And the barn's brown length, and the cattle-yard,

And the white horns tossing above the wall.

There are the bee-hives ranged in the sun;

And down by the brink

Of the brook are her poor flowers, weed o'er-run,
Pansy and daffodil, rose and pink.

A year has gone, as the tortoise goes,

Heavy and slow;

And the same rose blows, and the same sun glows,
And the same brook sings of a year ago.

There's the same sweet clover-smell in the breeze;
And the June sun warm

Tangles his wings of fire in the trees,

Setting, as then, over Fernside farm.

I mind me how, with a lover's care,

From my Sunday coat

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I brushed off the burs, and smoothed my hair,

And cooled at the brookside my brow and throat.

Since we parted, a month had passed

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To love, a year;

Down through the beeches I looked at last

On the little red gate and the well-sweep near.

The barn's brown gable, the vine by the door,-
Nothing changed but the hives of bees.

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Before them, under the garden wall,

Forward and back,

Went drearily singing the chore-girl small,

Draping each hive with a shred of black.

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Trembling, I listened: the summer sun
Had the chill of snow,

For I knew she was telling the bees of one.
Gone on the journey we all must go!

Then I said to myself, "My Mary weeps

For the dead to-day:

Haply her blind old grandsire sleeps

The fret and the pain of his age away."

But her dog whined low; on the doorway sill,

With his cane to his chin,

The old man sat; and the chore-girl still
Sung to the bees stealing out and in.

And the song she was singing ever since
In my ear sounds on:

"Stay at home, pretty bees, fly not hence-
Mistress Mary is dead and gone!"

1858.

MY PLAYMATE

The pines were dark on Ramoth hill,
Their song was soft and low;

The blossoms in the sweet May wind

Were falling like the snow.

The blossoms drifted at our feet,

The orchard birds sang clear;

The sweetest and the saddest day
It seemed of all the year.

For, more to me than birds or flowers,
My playmate left her home,

And took with her the laughing spring,

The music and the bloom.

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1858.

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She kissed the lips of kith and kin,

She laid her hand in mine:

What more could ask the bashful boy

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Who fed her father's kine?

The dark pines sing on Ramoth hill

The slow song of the sea.

I wonder if she thinks of them,
And how the old time seems;

If ever the pines of Ramoth wood
Are sounding in her dreams.

I see her face, I hear her voice:
Does she remember mine?
And what to her is now the boy
Who fed her father's kine?

What cares she that the orioles build
For other eyes than ours;

That other hands with nuts are filled,
And other laps with flowers?

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