To listen once more to that old man’s wild whoop,
As he basted his bunion out on the front stoop.
“The above exquisite poem was written in 1881, when the author was a young man under 30. It was addressed to a certain old gentleman, the hero of the occasion portrayed. A Chicago editor thought so well of the poem that he once published quite an edition on wood pulp paper. Whittier the poet wrote of it, and its young author, that ‘he had evidently been there.’”
The same “bad man” quotes, on another occasion, without giving the author’s name, the following lines:—
Falling leaf and fading tree
Lines of white in a sullen sea,
Shadows rising o’er you and me,
The swallows are making them ready to fly
Wheeling out on a windy sky;
Good-bye, summer, good-bye, good-bye.