The old song.

   The minstrel of the classic lay
   Of love and wine who sings
   Still found the fingers run astray
   That touched the rebel strings.

   Of Cadmus he would fair have sung,
   Of Atreus and his line;
   But all the jocund echoes rung
   With songs of love and wine.

   Ah, brothers!  I would fair have caught
   Some fresher fancy’s gleam;
   My truant accents find, unsought,
   The old familiar theme.

   Love, Love! but not the sportive child
   With shaft and twanging bow,
   Whose random arrows drove us wild
   Some threescore years ago;

   Not Eros, with his joyous laugh,
   The urchin blind and bare,
   But Love, with spectacles and staff,
   And scanty, silvered hair.

   Our heads with frosted locks are white,
   Our roofs are thatched with snow,
   But red, in chilling winter’s spite,
   Our hearts and hearthstones glow.

   Our old acquaintance, Time, drops in,
   And while the running sands
   Their golden thread unheeded spin,
   He warms his frozen hands.

   Stay, winged hours, too swift, too sweet,
   And waft this message o’er
   To all we miss, from all we meet
   On life’s fast-crumbling shore: 

   Say that to old affection true
   We hug the narrowing chain
   That binds our hearts,—­alas, how few
   The links that yet remain!

   The fatal touch awaits them all
   That turns the rocks to dust;
   From year to year they break and fall,
   They break, but never rust.

   Say if one note of happier strain
   This worn-out harp afford,
   —­One throb that trembles, not in vain,
   Their memory lent its chord.

   Say that when Fancy closed her wings
   And Passion quenched his fire,
   Love, Love, still echoed from the strings
   As from Anacreon’s lyre!

   January 8, 1885.

VII

A RECORD OF ANTIPATHIES

In thinking the whole matter over, Dr. Butts felt convinced that, with care and patience and watching his opportunity, he should get at the secret, which so far bad yielded nothing but a single word.  It might be asked why he was so anxious to learn what, from all appearances, the young stranger was unwilling to explain.  He may have been to some extent infected by the general curiosity of the persons around him, in which good Mrs. Butts shared, and which she had helped to intensify by revealing the word dropped by Paolo.  But this was not really his chief motive.  He could not look upon this young man, living a life of unwholesome solitude, without a natural desire to do all that his science and his knowledge of human nature could help him to do towards bringing him into healthy relations with the world about him.  Still,