- My listening angel heard the prayer,

And, calmly smiling, said,

"If I but touch thy silvered hair,

Thy hasty wish hath sped.

"But is there nothing in thy track
To bid thee fondly stay,

While the swift seasons hurry back
To find the wished-for day?"

- Ah, truest soul of womankind!
Without thee, what were life?

One bliss I cannot leave behind :
I'll take-my-precious-wife!

-The angel took a sapphire pen
And wrote in rainbow dew,
"The man would be a boy again,
And be a husband too!"

"And is there nothing yet unsaid Before the change appears? Remember, all their gifts have fled

With those dissolving years!"

DE SAUTY.

Was he born of woman, this alleged De Sauty?
Or a living product of galvanic action,

Like the acarus bred in Crosse's flint-solution?
Speak, thou Cyano-Rhinal!

187

BLUE-NOSE.

Many things thou askest, jackknife-bearing stranger, Much-conjecturing mortal, pork-and-treacle-waster! Pretermit thy whittling, wheel thine ear-flap toward me, Thou shalt hear them answered.

When the charge galvanic tingled through the cable,
At the polar focus of the wire electric
Suddenly appeared a white-faced man among us:
Called himself "DE SAUTY."

As the small opossum held in pouch maternal
Grasps the nutrient organ whence the term mammalia,
So the unknown stranger held the wire electric,

Sucking in the current.

When the current strengthened, bloomed the pale-faced stranger,

Took no drink nor victual, yet grew fat and rosy, -
And from time to time, in sharp articulation,

Said, "All right! DE SAUTY."

From the lonely station passed the utterance, spreading Through the pines and hemlocks to the groves of steeples, Till the land was filled with loud reverberations

Of "All right! DE SAUTY."

When the current slackened, drooped the mystic stran

ger,

Faded, faded, faded, as the stream grew weaker,—
Wasted to a shadow, with a hartshorn odor
Of disintegration.

Drops of deliquescence glistened on his forehead,
Whitened round his feet the dust of efflorescence,
Till one Monday morning, when the flow suspended,
There was no De Sauty.

Nothing but a cloud of elements organic,

C. O. H. N. Ferrum, Chlor. Flu. Sil. Potassa,
Calc. Sod. Phosph. Mag. Sulphur, Mang. (?) Alumin. (?)
Cuprum, (?)

Such as man is made of.

Born of stream galvanic, with it he had perished!
There is no De Sauty now there is no current!
Give us a new cable, then again we 'll hear him
Cry," All right! DE SAUTY."

THE OLD MAN DREAMS.

Why, yes; for memory would recall
My fond paternal joys;

I could not bear to leave them all;

I'll take my — girl — and — boys!

The smiling angel dropped his pen,

"Why this will never do;

The man would be a boy again,

And be a father too!"

191

The household with its noise,

And wrote my dream, when morning broke,
To please the gray-haired boys.

MARE RUBRUM.

FLASH out a stream of blood-red wine!
For I would drink to other days;
And brighter shall their memory shine,
Seen flaming through its crimson blaze.
The roses die, the summers fade;
But every ghost of boyhood's dream
By Nature's magic power is laid

To sleep beneath this blood-red stream.

It filled the purple grapes that lay
And drank the splendors of the sun
Where the long summer's cloudless day
Is mirrored in the broad Garonne ;

It pictures still the bacchant shapes
That saw their hoarded sunlight shed,
The maidens dancing on the grapes,

Their milk-white ankles splashed with red.