She sees it back in the clean-swept kitchen,
    A part of her girlhood’s little world;
  Her mother is there by the window, stitching;
    Spindle buzzes, and reel is whirled
  With many a click; on her little stool
    She sits, a child by the open door,
  Watching, and dabbling her feet in the pool
    Of sunshine spilled on the gilded floor.

  Her sisters are spinning all day long;
    To her wakening sense, the first sweet warning
  Of daylight come, is the cheerful song
    To the hum of the wheel, in the early morning. 
  Benjie, the gentle, red-cheeked boy,
    On his way to school, peeps in at the gate;
  In neat, white pinafore, pleased and coy,
    She reaches a hand to her bashful mate;

  And under the elms, a prattling pair,
    Together they go, through glimmer and gloom
  It all comes back to her, dreaming there
    In the low-raftered garret room;
  The hum of the wheel, and the summer weather
    The heart’s first trouble, and love’s beginning,
  Are all in her memory linked together;
    And now it is she herself that is spinning.

  With the bloom of youth on cheek and lip,
    Turning the spokes with the flashing pin,
  Twisting the thread from the spindle-tip,
    Stretching it out and winding it in,
  To and fro, with a blithesome tread,
    Singing she goes, and her heart is full,
  And many a long-drawn golden thread
    Of fancy, is spun with the shining wool.

[Footnote 91:  After struggling through many early discouragements has attained high repute, both in prose and verse.  Has written several novels.  New York is his native State.]

* * * * *

=_Henry Timrod,[92] 1829-1867._=

From his “Poems.”

=_416._= THE UNKNOWN DEAD.

  The rain is plashing on my sill,
  But all the winds of Heaven are still;
  And so it falls with that dull sound
  Which thrills us in the church-yard ground,
  When the first spadeful drops like lead
  Upon the coffin of the dead. 
  Beyond my streaming window-pane,
  I cannot see the neighboring vane,
  Yet from its old familiar tower
  The bell comes, muffled, through the shower
  What strange and unsuspected link
  Of feeling touched, has made me think—­
  While with a vacant soul and eye
  I watch that gray and stony sky—­
  Of nameless graves on battle-plains
  Washed by a single winter’s rains,
  Where—­some beneath Virginian hills,
  And some by green Atlantic rills,
  Some by the waters of the West—­
  A myriad unknown heroes rest? 
  Ah! not the chiefs, who, dying, see
  Their flags in front of victory,
  Or, at their life-blood’s noble cost
  Pay for a battle nobly lost,
  Claim from their monumental beds
  The bitterest tears a nation sheds. 
  Beneath yon lonely mound—­the