To hide her flushing cheek from one who talks.
A happy mother with her fair-faced girls,
In whose sweet Spring again her youth she sees,
With shout and dance, and laugh and bound and song,
Stripping an Autumn orchard’s laden trees.
An aged woman in a wintry room—
Frost on the pane, without the whirling snow—
Reading old letters of her far-off youth,
Of sorrows past and joys of long ago.
N. C. Bennet.