Though the children grew like rabbits,
Still she taught them how to cipher,
How to read and write a little—
Thus we find it in the records—
Taught the prayers she learned from mother,
In her father's stately mansion,
Near the mighty Central River,
Long ago when she was little
And her world was filled with gladness.
Sped her years to five and eighty,
From her birth beside the river,
By the mighty Central River,
In her father's stately mansion,
With its comforts and its riches,
Still she toiled beside the river,
In the valley of the Tunxis,
Through the ever changing seasons,
Watching o'er her children's children
To the third great generation,
Till they called her Granny Chaugham,
And her name became a legend,
Fold beyond the distant oceans,
And her spouse, the Honest Chaugham
Lived respected by all people,
To the year of eighteen hundred,
When his spirit left the hill side,
On its journey to the Happy Hunting
Ground beyond the western sunset.
33. MOLLY TRIED TO READ THE SCRIPTURE.
The clouds obscured the western sky,
Darkness circled round the grave yard
As Molly sadly breathed a sigh
O'er the grave of Honest Chaugham.
There was sorrow in the village,
When they laid him on the hill side
Southward where the soil is sandy,
In the grave yard in the forest.
Molly tried to read the Scriptures,
So the children have reported,
From an old and tattered Bible—
Last of all her childhood treasures,
Given by her loving mother,
But her voice was low and broken,
Hardly could they hear her speaking,
So they sat in gloomy silence
'Till the ev'ning shadows lengthened,
And they left him there in darkness
With a field-stone for a marker,
Seen to-day on Ragged Mountain
In the graveyard's dim enclosure
In the town of fair Barkhamsted.
34. GRANNY CHAUGHAM THOUGHT OF MOTHER.
All lonely, weary and bereft,
Granny Chaugham thought of mother
And all the friends that she had left
By the mighty Central River.
Only then did Granny Chaugham
Seem to feel the years were many;
Only then did Granny Chaugham
Seem to think of home and mother
And her father's spacious mansion
By the mighty Central River,
With the flowers in the spring-time
And the yellow leaves of autumn;
Then the coming of the winter
And the friends that used to gather
In the ev'ning in the parlor—
All the fiddling and the dancing,
All the gay and playful parties,
All the games they played together,
Thinking not of gloom or sorrow—
Joyous days now gone forever—
Days when father was good-natured
And her mother's days were happy.
35. "MOTHER, 1 AM WEARY WAITING:
And from the darkness came a voice—
"Gone forever are your parents;
Long years ago you had your choice,
Speaking with your angry father."