eep, their mistress seeks
refuge in headache and smelling salts, the hard father feels a
strange, an irrepressible welling up of little memories. He loves the
golden haired boy; he hardly knew it before. If he could only hear
once more the merry laugh, the chatter and the shouting! But he cannot
hear it any more; he will never hear his child's voice again. Baby has
passed into the far-away Thought-World. Baby is now only a dream and a
memory, only the recollection of a music that is heard no more. Baby
has crossed that cloudy, storm-driven bourn of speculation and fear
whither we are all tending.
A few white bones upon a lonely sand,
A rotting corpse beneath the meadow grass,
That cannot hear the footsteps as they pass,
Memorial urns pressed by some foolish hand
Have been for all the goal of troublous fears,
Ah! breaking hearts and faint eyes dim with tears,
And momentary hope by breezes framed
To flame that ever fading falls again,
And leaves but blacker night and deeper pain,
Have been the mould of life in every land.
Baby is planted out for evermore in the dank and weedy little cemetery
that lies on the outskirts of the station where he lived and died.
Those golden curls, those soft and rounded limbs, and that laughing
mouth, are given up to darkness and the eternal hunger of corruption.
Through sunshine and rain, through the long days of summer, through
the long nights of winter, for ever, for ever, Baby lies silent and
dreamless under that waving grass. The bee will hum overhead for
evermore, and the swallow glance among the cypress. The butterfly will
flutter for ages and ages among the rank flowers--Baby will still lie
there. Come away, come away; your cheeks are pale; it cannot be, we
cannot believe it, we must not remember it; other Baby voices will
kindle our life and love, Baby's toys will pass to other Baby hands.
All will change; we will change.
Yet, darling, but come back to me;
Whatever change the years have wrought,
I find not yet one lonely thought
That cries against my wish for thee.
ALI BABA, K.C.B.
No. XI
THE RED CHUPRASSIE
OR, THE CORRUPT LICTOR[R]
[October 18, 1879.]
The red chuprassie is our Colorado beetle, our potato disease, our
Home ruler, our cupboard skeleton, the little rift in our lute. The
red-coated chuprassie is a cancer in
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