[6] Lawyer, Senator from Nebraska, 1895—born at Montpelier, Vt., 1847.
[7] Pronounced “Sombray.”
[8] Adobe, pronounced A-do´by, a thick clay of which sun-dried bricks are made.
[9] Robert Lloyd was an English poet of the middle eighteenth century.
[10] This remarkable poem relates to revelry in India at a time when the English officers serving in that country were being struck down by pestilence. It has been correctly styled “the very poetry of military despair.”
[11] Some of the greatest literature of this war has been written by British Tommies—in the trenches or in hospitals; but nothing finer or better interpreting the psychology of the men at the front has yet appeared in print than this poem by Bombardier B. Bumpas, of the Australian contingent, wounded at Gallipoli and while convalescing in a hospital at Cairo, minus a leg and an eye.
[12] From “Madrigali.”
[13] From Hiawatha.
[14] Mr. Miller gives the following interesting note to the above poem:
“We had been moving West and West from my birth, at Liberty, Union County, Indiana, November 10, 1841 or 1842 (the Bible was burned and we don’t know which year), and now were in the woods of the Miami Indian Reserve. My first recollection is of starting up from the trundle-bed with my two little brothers and looking out one night at father and mother at work burning brush-heaps, which threw a lurid flare against the greased paper window. Late that autumn I was measured for my first shoes, and Papa led me to his school. Then a strange old woman came, and there was mystery and a smell of mint, and one night, as we three little ones were hurried away through the woods to a neighbor’s, she was very cross. We three came back alone in the cold, early morning. There was a little snow, rabbit tracks in the trail, and some quail ran hastily from cover to cover. We three little ones were all alone and silent, so silent. We knew nothing, nothing at all, and yet we knew, intuitively, all; but truly the divine mystery of mother nature, God’s relegation of His last great work to woman, her partnership with Him in creation—not one of us had ever dreamed of. Yet we three little lads huddled up in a knot near the ice-hung eaves of the log cabin outside the corner where mother’s bed stood and—did the new baby hear her silent and awed little brothers? Did she feel them, outside there, huddled close together in the cold and snow, listening, listening? For lo! a little baby cry came through the cabin wall; and then we all rushed around the corner of the cabin, jerked the latch and all three in a heap tumbled up into the bed and peered down into the little pink face against mother’s breast. Gentle, gentle, how more than ever gentle were we all six now in that little log cabin. Papa doing everything so gently, saying nothing, only doing, doing. And ever so and always toward the West, till 1852, when he had touched the sea of seas, and could go no farther. And so gentle always! Can you conceive how gentle? Seventy-two years he led and lived in the wilderness and yet never fired or even laid hand to a gun.”