Sometimes, with twilight round me,
I see, or seem to see,
A distant shore where friends of yore
Linger an' watch for me.
Sometimes I've heered 'em callin'
So tender-like 'nd low
That it almost seemed like a dream I dreamed,
Or an echo of long ago;
An' sometimes on my forehead
There falls a soft caress,
Or the touch of a hand,--you understand,--
I'm gettin' on, I guess.

THE SCHNELLEST ZUG.

FROM Hanover to Leipzig is but a little way,
Yet the journey by the so-called schnellest zug consumes a day;
You start at half-past ten or so, and not till nearly night
Do the double towers of Magdeburg loom up before your sight;
From thence to Leipzig 's quick enough,--of that I'll not complain,--
But from Hanover to Magdeburg--confound that schnellest train!

The Germans say that "schnell" means fast, and "schnellest" faster
yet,--
In all my life no grimmer bit of humor have I met!
Why, thirteen miles an hour 's the greatest speed they ever go,
While on the engine piston-rods do moss and lichens grow;
And yet the average Teuton will presumptuously maintain
That one _can't_ know what swiftness is till he's tried das schnellest
train!

Fool that I was! I should have walked,--I had no time to waste;
The little journey I had planned I had to do in haste,--
The quaint old town of Leipzig with its literary mart,
And Dresden with its crockery-shops and wondrous wealth of art,
The Saxon Alps, the Carlsbad cure for all dyspeptic pain,--
These were the ends I had in view when I took that schnellest train.

The natives dozed around me, yet none too deep to hear
The guard's sporadic shout of "funf minuten" (meaning beer);
I counted forty times at least that voice announce the stops
Required of those fat natives to glut their greed for hops,
Whilst _I_ crouched in a corner, a monument to woe,
And thought unholy, awful things, and felt my whiskers grow!
And then, the wretched sights one sees while travelling by that
train,--
The women doing men-folks' work at harvesting the grain,
Or sometimes grubbing in the soil, or hitched to heavy carts
Beside the family cow or dog, doing their slavish parts!
The husbands strut in soldier garb,--indeed _they_ were too vain
To let creation see _them_ work from that creeping schne