THE DOUBLE-HEADED SNAKE.

Singing, with his gray hair floating

Round his rosy ample face,-
Now a thousand Saxon craftsmen
Stitch and hammer in his place.

All the pastoral lanes so grassy
Now are Traffic's dusty streets;
From the village, grown a city,
Fast the rural grace retreats.

But, still green, and tall, and stately,
On the river's winding shores,
Stand the Occidental plane-trees,
Stand Hugh Tallant's sycamores.

327

THE DOUBLE-HEADED SNAKE OF NEWBURY.

"CONCERNING ye Amphisbæna, as soon as I received your commands, I made diligent inquiry:

he assures me yt it had really two heads, one at each end; two mouths, two stings or tongues."—REV. CHRISTOPHER Toppan to Cotton MatHER.

FAR away in the twilight time
Of every people, in every clime,
Dragons and griffins and monsters dire,
Born of water, and air, and fire,
Or nursed, like the Python, in the mud
And ooze of the old Deucalion flood,
Crawl and wriggle and foam with rage,
Through dusk tradition and ballad age.
So from the childhood of Newbury town
And its time of fable the tale comes down
Of a terror which haunted bush and brake,
The Amphisbæna, the Double Snake !

Thou who makest the tale thy mirth,
Consider that strip of Christian earth

On the desolate shore of a sailless sea,
Full of terror and mystery,
Half-redeemed from the evil hold

Of the wood so dreary, and dark, and old,
Which drank with its lips of leaves the dew
When Time was young, and the world was new,
And wove its shadows with sun and moon,

Ere the stones of Cheops were squared and hewn
Think of the sea's dread monotone,

Of the mournful wail from the pine-wood blown,
Of the strange, vast splendors that lit the North,
Of the troubled throes of the quaking earth,
And the dismal tales the Indian told,.
Till the settler's heart at his hearth grew cold,
And he shrank from the tawny wizard's boasts,
And the hovering shadows seemed full of ghosts
And above, below, and on every side,

The fear of his creed seemed verified;-
And think, if his lot were now thine own,
To grope with terrors nor named nor known,
How laxer muscle and weaker nerve
And a feebler faith thy need might serve;

And own to thyself the wonder more

That the snake had two heads, and not a score !

Whether he lurked in the Oldtown fen
Or the gray earth-flax of the Devil's Den,
Or swam in the wooded Artichoke,
Or coiled by the Northman's Written Rock,
Nothing on record is left to show;

Only the fact that he lived, we know,
And left the cast of a double head

In the scaly mask which he yearly shed.

For he carried a head where his tail should be,
And the two, of course, could never agree,
But wriggled about with main and might,
Now to the left and now to the right;
Pulling and twisting this way and that,
Neither knew what the other was at.

THE DOUBLE-HEADED SNAKE.

A snake with two heads, lurking so near!—
Judge of the wonder, guess at the fear!
Think what ancient gossips might say,
Shaking their heads in their dreary way,
Between the meetings on Sabbath-day!
How urchins, searching at day's decline
The Common Pasture for sheep or kine,
The terrible double-ganger heard
In leafy rustle or whirr of bird!
Think what a zest it gave to the sport,
In berry-time of the younger sort,
As over pastures blackberry-twined
Reuben and Dorothy lagged behind,
And closer and closer, for fear of harm,
The maiden clung to her lover's arm ;
And how the spark, who was forced to stay,
By his sweetheart's fears, till the break of day
Thanked the snake for the fond delay!

Far and wide the tale was told,

Like a snowball growing while it rolled.
The nurse hushed with it the baby's cry;
And it served, in the worthy minister's eye,
To paint the primitive serpent by.
Cotton Mather came galloping down
All the way to Newbury town,

With his eyes agog and his ears set wide,
And his marvellous inkhorn at his side;
Stirring the while in the shallow pool
Of his brains for the lore he learned at school,
To garnish the story, with here a streak
Of Latin, and there another of Greek :
And the tales he heard and the notes he took,
Behold! are they not in his Wonder-Book?

Stories, like dragons, are hard to kill.
If the snake does not, the tale runs still
In Byfield Meadows, on Pipestave Hill.
And still, whenever husband and wife

829

Publish the shame of their daily strife,
And, with mad cross-purpose, tug and strain
At either end of the marriage-chain,

The gossips say, with a knowing shake

Of their gray heads, "Look at the Double Snake! One in body and two in will,

The Amphisbæna is living still!"

THE SWAN SONG OF PARSON AVERY.

WHEN the reaper's task was ended, and the summer wearing late,

Parson Avery sailed from Newbury, with his wife and children eight,

Dropping down the river-harbor in the shallop "Watch and Wait."

Pleasantly lay the clearings in the mellow summer

morn,

With the newly-planted orchards dropping their fruits first-born,

And the homesteads like green islands amid a sea of corn.

Broad meadows reached out seaward the tided creeks between,

And hills rolled wave-like inland, with oaks and walnuts green ;—

A fairer home, a goodlier land, his eyes had never

seen.

Yet away sailed Parson Avery, away where duty

led,

And the voice of God seemed calling, to break the living bread

To the souls of fishers starving on the rocks of Marblehead.

THE SWAN SONG OF PARSON AVERY. 331

All day they sailed: at nightfall the pleasant landbreeze died,

The blackening sky, at midnight, its starry lights denied,

And far and low the thunder of tempest prophesied !

Blotted out were all the coast-lines, gone were rock, and wood, and sand;

Grimly anxious stood the skipper with the rudder in his hand,

And questioned of the darkness what was sea and what was land.

And the preacher heard his dear ones, nestled round him, weeping sore :

"Never heed, my little children! Christ is walking on before

To the pleasant land of heaven, where the sea shall be no more.”

All at once the great cloud parted, like a curtain drawn aside,

To let down the torch of lightning on the terror far and wide

And the thunder and the whirlwind together smote the tide.

There was wailing in the shallop, woman's wail and man's despair,

A crash of breaking timbers on the rocks so sharp and bare,

And, through it all, the murmur of Father Avery's prayer.

From his struggle in the darkness with the wild waves and the blast,

On a rock, where every billow broke above him as it passed,

Alone, of all his household, the man of God was

cast.