Stedman and Hutchinson, comps. A Library of American Literature:
An Anthology in Eleven Volumes. 1891.
Vols. IX–XI: Literature of the Republic, Part IV., 1861–1889
A Picture
By Charles Gamage Eastman (18161860)T
Smoking his pipe of clay,
While his hale old wife with busy care
Was clearing the dinner away;
A sweet little girl with fine blue eyes
On her grandfather’s knee was catching flies.
With a tear on his wrinkled face;
He thought how often her mother, dead,
Used to sit in the self-same place;
As the tear stole down from his half-shut eye,
“Don’t smoke!” said the child, “how it makes you cry!”
Where the shade after noon used to steal,
The busy old wife by the open door
Was turning the spinning-wheel,
And the old brass clock on the mantletree
Had plodded along to almost three.
While close to his heaving breast
The moistened brow and the check so fair
Of his sweet grandchild were pressed;
His head, bent down, on her soft hair lay:
Fast asleep were they both, that summer day!