Pattering over the boards, she comes and goes at her will,
While Harry is in the five-acre and Charlie ploughing the hill.
And Harry and Charlie, I hear them, too,—they sing to their team;
Often they come to the door in a pleasant kind of dream.
They come and sit by my chair, they hover about my bed:
I am not always certain if they be alive or dead.
And yet I know for a truth, there’s none of them left alive;
For Harry went at sixty, your father at sixty-five;
And Willy, my eldest born, at nigh threescore and ten;
I knew them all as babies, and now they are elderly men.