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They were all doctors of renown,

The great men of a famous town,

With deep brows, wrinkled, broad and wise,
Beneath their wide phylacteries;

The wisdom of the East was theirs,

And honor crowned their silver hairs;

The man they jeered and laughed to scorn
Was unlearned, poor, and humbly born;

But he knew better far than they,

What came to him that Sabbath day;
And what the Christ had done for him,

He knew, and not the Sanhedrim.

JIM BLUDSO, OF THE PRAIRIE BELLE.

Wall, no! I can't tell whar he lives,
Becase he don't live, you see;
Leastways, he's got out of the habit

Of livin' like you and me.

Whar have you been for the last three year
That you have n't heard folks tell

How Jimmy Bludso passed in his checks
The night of the Prairie Belle?

He were n't no saint,-them engineers
Is all pretty much alike,—
One wife in Natchez-under-the-Hill
And another one here, in Pike;
A keerless man in his talk was Jim,
And an awkward hand in a row,
But he never funked, and he never lied,—
I reckon he never knowed how.

JIM BLUDSO, OF THE PRAIRIE Belle. 313

And this was all the religion he had,

To treat his engine well;

Never be passed on the river,

To mind the pilot's bell;

And if ever the Prairie Belle took fire,

A thousand times he swore,

He'd hold her nozzle agin the bank
Till the last soul got ashore.

All boats has their day on the Mississip,

And her day come at last,—

The Movastar was a better boat,

But the Belle she would n't be passed.
And so she come tearin' along that night—
The oldest craft on the line—

With a nigger squat on her safety-valve,

And her furnace crammed, rosin and pine.

The fire bust out as she clared the bar,
And burnt a hole in the night,

And quick as a flash she turned, and made

For that willer-bank on the right.

There was runnin' and cursin', but Jim yelled out,

Over all the infernal roar,

"I'll hold her nozzle agin the bank

Till the last galoot's ashore."

Through the hot, black breath of the burnin' boat

Jim Bludso's voice was heard,

And they all had trust in his cussedness,

And knowed he would keep his word.
And, sure's you're born, they all got off
Afore the smokestacks fell,-

And Bludso's ghost went up alone

In the smoke of the Prairie Belle.

He were n't no saint-but at jedgment I'd run my chance with Jim,

'Longside of some pious gentlemen

That would n't shook hands with him. He seen his duty, a dead-sure thing,— And went for it thar and then; And Christ ain't a-going to be too hard On a man that died for men.

Paullt Itayne

AN ANNIVERSARY.

O Love, it is our wedding day!

This morn,-how swift the seasons flee !

A virgin morn of cloudless May,

You gave your loyal hand to me,

Your dainty hand, clasped sweet and sure

As Love's sweet self, forevermore!

O Love, it is our wedding day;

The very rustling of your dress, The trembling of your arm that lay

On mine, with timorous happiness,

Your fluttered breath and faint footfall,—
Ah, sweet, I hear, I see them all!

O Love, it is our wedding day,

And backward Time's strange current rolls,

Till life's and love's auspicious May

Once more is blooming in our souls, And larklike, swell the songs of hope, Your blissful bridal horoscope.

O Love, it is our wedding day,—

Yet say, did those fair hopes but sing,
Lapped in the tuneful morn of May,
To die or droop on faltering wing,
When noontide heats and evening chills
Made pale the flowers and veiled the hills?

O Love, it is our wedding day,

And none of those glad hopes of Youth, Thrilled to its height, outpoured a lay

To match our future's simple truth: Though deep the joy of vow and shrine, Our wedded calm is more divine!

O Love, it is our wedding day!

Life's summer, with slow-waning beam, Tints the near autumn's cloud-land gray To softness of a fairy dream,

Whence peace by musing pathos kissed, Smiles through a veil of golden mist.

O Love, it is our wedding day;

The conscious winds are whispering low Those passionate secrets of the May

Fraught with your kisses long ago; When memories of our years remote Are trembling in the mock-bird's throat.

O Love, it is our wedding day,

And not a thrush in woodland bowers,

And not a rivulet's silvery lay,

Nor tiny bee-song 'mid the flowers,

Nor any voice of land or sea,

But deepens love to ecstasy!

Our wedding day! The soul's noontide!
In these rare words at watchful rest
What sweet, melodious meanings hide
Like birds within one balmy nest,
Each quivering with an impulse strong
To flood all heaven and earth with song!

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