They all promised, and Harding read as follows:
THE PROSPECTOR.
How strangely to-night my memory flings
From the face of the past its shadowy wings,
And I see far back through the mist and tears
Which make the record of twenty years;
From the beautiful days in the Golden State,
When life seemed sure by long leases from Fate;
From the wondrous visions of "long ago"
To the naked shade that we call "now."
Those halcyon days! There were four with me then—
Ernest and Ned, Wild Tom and Ben.
Now all are gone; Tom was first to die.
I held his hands, closed his glazed eye;
And many a tear o'er his grave we shed
As we tenderly pillowed his curly head
In the shadows deep of the pines, that stand
Forever solemn, forever fanned
By the winds that steal through the Golden Gate
And spread their balm o'er the Golden State.
And the others, too, they all are dead.
By the turbid Gila perished Ned;
Brave, noble Ernest, he was lost
Amid Montana's ice and frost;
And out upon a desert trail
Our Bennie met the spectre pale.
And I am left—the last of all—
And as to-night the white snows fall,
As barbarous winds around me roar,
I think the long past o'er and o'er—
What I have hoped and suffered, all,
From twenty years rolls back the pall,
From the dusty, thorny, weary track,
As the tortuous path I follow back.
In my childhood's home they think me, there,
A failure, or lost, till my name in the prayer
At eve is forgot. Well, they cannot know
That my toil through heat, through tempest and snow,
While it seemed for naught but a struggle for pelf,
Was more for them, far more, than myself.
Ah, well! As my hair turns slowly to snow
The places of childhood more distantly grow;
And my dreams are changing. 'Tis home no more,
For shadowy hands from the other shore
Stretch nightly down, and it seems as when
I lived with Tom, Ned, Ernest and Ben.
And the mountains of Earth seem dwindling down,
And the hills of Eden, with golden crown,
Rise up, and I think, in the last great day,
Will my claim above bear a fire assay?
From the slag of earth, and the baser strains,
Will the crucible show of precious grains
Enough to give me a standing above,
Where in temples of Peace rock the cradles of Love?
"That is good, but it is too serious by half," Miller said, critically. "What is a young fellow like you doing with such a melancholy view of things?"