The Old Barn's Tenantry

The rooster stalks on the manger's ledge, He has a tail like a scimitar's edge, A marshall's plume on his afghan neck, An admiral's stride on his quarter deck, He rules the roost and walks the bay With a dreadf ni cold and a Turkish way, Two broadsides fireB with his rapid wings This sultan proud, of a line of kings - One gutteral laugh, four blasts of hora, Five rusty syllables rouse the mom ! The Saxon lambs in their woolen tabs Are playing school with the a, b, abs; A, e! I, o! All the cattle spell Till they make the blatant vowels teil, And a half-laugh whinny filis the stal Is When down in the rack the clover falls. A dove ia waltzing around his mate Two chevrons black on his wings of slate, And showing off with a wooing note The satin shine of his golden throat- lt is Ovid's "Art of Love" re-told In a binding fine of blue and gold! Ah, the buxom girls that helped the boys, The noble Helens of humbler Troys - As they stripped the husks with rustling fold From eight-rowed corn as yellow as gold, By the candle-light in pumpkin bowls, And the gleams that showed fantastic holes In the quaint old lantern's tattooed tin, From the hermit glim set up within ; By the rarer light in girlish eyes As dark as wells or as blue as skies. I hear the laugh when the ear is red see the blush with the f orfeit paid, The cedar cakes with the ancient twiBt, T-he eider cups that the girls have kissed, And I see the fiddler through the dusk As he twangs the ghost of "Money Musk!" The boys and girls in a doublé row Wait face to face till the magie bow Shall whip the tune from the violin, And the merry pulse of the f eet begin.