STRANGER
What group is this, begrim'd with dust and
heat,
Staring like strangers in the open street?
The women, ragged, wretched, and half dead,
Sit on the kerbstone hot and hang the head,
And clustering at their side stand children
brown,
Weary, with wondering eyes on the fair town.
Close by in knots beside the unhorsed team
The sunburn'd men stand talking in a dream,
For the vast tracts of country left behind
Seem now a haunting mirage in the mind.
Gaunt miners folding hands upon their breasts,
Big-jointed labourers looking ox-like down,
And sickly artizans with narrow chests
Still pallid from the smoke of English town.
Hard by to these a group of Teutons stand,
Light-hair'd, blue-eyed, still full of Fatherland,
With water-loving Northmen, who grow gay
To see the mimic sea gleam far away.
Now to this group, with a sharp questioning
face,
Cometh a holy magnate of the place
In decent black; shakes hands with some;
and then
Begins an eager converse with the men:
All brighten; even the children hush their cries,
And the pale women smile with sparkling eyes.