Some Old School-books.
I have been back to my home again,
To the place where I was born;
I have heard the wind from the stormy main
Go rustling through the corn;
I have seen the purple hills once more;
I have stood on the rocky coast
Where the waves storm inland to the shore;
But the thing that touched me most
Was a little leather strap that kept
Some school-books, tattered and torn!
I sighed, I smiled, I could have wept
When I came on them one morn;
For I thought of the merry little lad,
In the mornings sweet and cool,
If weather was good, or weather bad,
Going whistling off to school.
My fingers undid the strap again,
And I thought how my hand had changed,
And half in longing, and half in pain,
Backward my memory ranged.
There was the grammar I knew so well,—
I didn’t remember a rule;
And the old blue speller,—I used to spell
Better than any in school;
And the wonderful geography
I’ve read on the green hill-side,
When I’ve told myself I’d surely see
All lands in the world so wide,
From the Indian homes in the far, far West,
To the mystical Cathay.
I have seen them all. But Home is best
When the evening shades fall gray.
And there was the old arithmetic,
All tattered and stained with tears;
I and Jamie and little Dick
Were together in by-gone years.
Jamie has gone to the better land;
And I get now and again,
A letter in Dick’s bold, ready hand,
From some great Western plain.
There wasn’t a book, and scarce a page,
That hadn’t some memory
Of days that seemed like a golden age,
Of friends I shall no more see.
And so I picked up the books again
And buckled the strap once more,
And brought them over the tossing main;
Come, children, and look them o’er.
And there they lie on a little stand
Not far from the Holy Book;
And his boys and girls with loving care
O’er grammar and speller look.
He said, “They speak to me, children dear,
Of a past without alloy;
And the look of Books, in promise clear,
Of a future full of joy.”
Harper’s Weekly.