m-house hearth, the first autumn fire was kindled;
Scintillant hickory bark and dryest limbs of the beech-tree
Burned, where all summer long the boughs of asparagus flourished.
Wild were the children with mirth, and grouping and clinging
together,
Danced with the dancing flame, and lithely swayed with its humor;
Ran to the window-panes, and peering forth into the darkness,
Saw there another room, flame-lit, and with frolicking children.
(Ah! by such phantom hearths, I think that we sit with our
first-loves!)
Sometimes they tossed on the floor, and sometimes they hid in the
corners,
Shouting and laughing aloud, and never resting a moment,
In the rude delight, the boisterous gladness of childhood,--
Cruel as summer sun and singing-birds to the heartsick.
Clement sat in his chair unmoved in the midst of the hubbub,
Rapt, with unseeing eyes; and unafraid in their gambols,
By his tawny beard the children caught him, and clambered
Over his knees, and waged a mimic warfare across them,
Made him their battle-ground, and won and lost kingdoms upon him.
Airily to and fro, and out of one room to another
Passed his cousin, and busied herself with things of the household,
Nonchalant, debonair, blithe, with bewitching housewifely
importance,
Laying the cloth for the supper, and bringing the meal from the
kitchen;
Fairer than ever she seemed, and more than ever she mocked him,
Coming behind his chair, and clasping her fingers together
Over his eyes in a girlish caprice, and crying, "Who is it?"
Vexed his despair with a vision of wife and of home and of
children,
Calling his sister's children around her, and stilling their
clamor,
Making believe they were hers. And Clement sat moody and silent,
Blank to the wistful gaze of his mother bent on his visage
With the tender pain, the pitiful, helpless devotion
Of the mother that looks on the face of her son in his trouble,
Grown beyond her consoling, and knows that she cannot befriend him.
Then his cousin laughed, and in idleness talked with the children;
Sometimes she turned to him, and then when the thistle was falling,
Caught it and twined it again in her hair, and called it her
keepsake,
Smiled, and made him ashamed of his petulant gift there, before
them.
But, when the night was grown old and the two by the hearthstone
together