This one last glance at earth—one, only one—
To see, as through a vail, the gentle face
Bent o'er me softly, with the timid love
That half distrusts the sleep which gives it grace.
The thought that bids mine eyelids half unclose
Fades to a dream, and out from Summer goes,
In the brown Autumn of her drooping eyes.
Thus irregular in rhythm and vagrant in measure, my boy, are the half-sleeping thoughts of a summer noon
in Virginia; and it was fully an hour before I could summon enough strength of mind to peruse a letter recently consigned to me by a rustic chap in my native village.
This chap describes to me what he calls the "Downfall of the Dramy," and says he:
The Dramy is a article for which I have great taste, and which I prefer to prayer-meeting as a regular thing. Since the time I wore breeches intended to facilitate frequent spankings, I have looked upon theatrical artiks with a speeshees of excitement not to be egspressed. I was once paying teller to a barber artik who shaved a great theatrical artik, and although the theatrical artik never could pay for his shaving until he drew his celery, he always frowned so splendidly when he turned down his collar, and said: "What ho! there Figaro," that my infant mind yearned to ask him for a few tickets to the show.
This great respek for the dramy has grown with my hair, and since this high old war has desolated the dramy, my buzzom has been nothing else but a wilderness of pangs. The other evening, my fren—which is courting a six story house with a woman in the title deed—called at my shattoe, and proposed that we should wander amid the ruins of the dramy. "It's rejooced to a skellington," says he, quite mournful, "and its E pluribus Onion is gone down into the hocean wave." As my friend used this strong egspression, he tried to wink at me, but didn't get farther than a hik-cup. Arm in-arm, like two Siamese-twins in rejooced circumstances, we walked in speechless
silence to what was formerly the entrance half of a theatre in the pallermy days of the dramy. It was like the entrance to the great desert of Sary, and as we groped our way through the grass to the ticket office, I observed six wild geese and a raccoon in a jungle that was a umberella stand in the pallermy days. The treasurer was entirely covered with cobwebs, which had been accumulating since the day he last saw speshee, and when he at last tore himself out, the sight of the quarter which I handed in sent him into immediate convulsions.
"Excuse me," says he, "if I weep over this preshus coin; but the force of old associations is too much for this affectionate heart."
He then sent a fly-blown little boy for a tumbler of brandy, and was weeping into it copious when we emerged from his presence. Upon entering the shattered temple of the dramy, we found a vetrun of 1812, which the manager had hired to keep company with the man what lit the gas, that artik having declared that if he was kept in solitude any longer he should shoot himself from sheer melancholy. It was the vetrun's business to keep moving from seat to seat until the performance was over, so that the artful cuss of a manager could say "every seat was okipied" in the next morning's newspaper. When the manager, who was representing the orkestra with a comb wrapt in paper, saw me and my fren, he paused in the middle of his overture, and said we should have a private box, but that the families of his principal artiks were keepin' house in the private boxes, and was
rayther crowded for room. Seeing me put my hand in my pocket, he said, tearful: