Thought kit, “I ’ll keep still till ’t is over,
And none will suspect it was I.”
For the puss awoke, when her mistress spoke,
And she well understood the cry.
But, mewing at length for her dinner,
Kit’s mouth confessed the whole truth:
It opened so wide, that her mistress spied
A rose-leaf pierced by her tooth.
Then kit was expelled from the parlor
All covered with shame. And those
Inclined, like her, in secret to err,
Should remember kit with the rose.
[THE STORM IN THE FOREST.]
The storm in the forest is rending and sweeping;
While tree after tree bows its stately green head;
The flowerets beneath them are bending and weeping;
And leaves, torn and trembling, all round them are spread.
The bird that had roamed, till she thinks her benighted,
Dismayed, hastens back to her home in the wood;
And flags not a wing, till her bosom, affrighted,
Has laid its warm down o’er her own little brood.
And they, since that fond one so quickly has found them,
To shelter their heads from the rain and the blast,
Shall fearless repose, while the bolts burst around them;
And lie calm and safe, till the darkness is past.
Hast thou, too, not felt, when the tempest was drearest,
And rending thy covert, or shaking thy rest,
Thine own blessed angel that moment the nearest—
Thy screen in his pinion—thy shield in his breast?