ONE OF THE LEGION.

A CITIZEN of South Hill, His visage bathed in tears, His raiment streaked with rust and dust, His mind distraught with fears, Was leaning up by the shattered gate, And his sad eyes gazed around Where reckless ruin here and there With fragments strewed the ground. But a drayman stood beside him To hear what he might say, As he stretched him out his good right arm And waited for his pay. The weeping mover faltered As he saw the drayman’s hand, And he said, “I haven’t a red, red cent In all of this broad fair land. I haven’t a clothes to my aching back Save only these rags you see; And all the furniture I have left Won’t pay you half your fee. There’s a leg of the table in the street, And the lamp globes strew the stair, And the stovepipe’s flattened out like a lath, And the clock is not nowhere. “Tell my wife, if you can find her, That when the job was done, The furniture wasn’t half so good As it was when we begun. That the end of the bureau she’s looking for Is down by the alley gate, And the parlor mirror is bent so bad She never can pound it straight. We broke the legs of the kitchen stove, And we smashed the Parian vase, And the dray ran over her rocking chair And ruined its stately grace. “Tell my sister, her darling new spring hat Was packed in a bag of corn, And I never again can look in her face And meet her glance of scorn. We spilled coal oil on her summer silk, And we tore her cashmere sacque, For her dressing bureau fell off the dray And the horse kicked out its back. “There’s another, not a sister, In happier days gone by, You’d know her by the savage light That glittered in her eye. Too business-like for foolery, Too sharp for my excuses— Ah me, I fear adversity Has naught but bitter uses; Tell her, the last time you saw me— For ere the clock strikes ten, I’ll be at work on the ‘Third Degree,’ The happiest of men; Tell her I said that she could go To the bow-wow wow-wow wows; That I’d stay down town when lodge was out, And sleep at a boarding-house Tell her she needn’t sit up for me, And she needn’t leave no light——” And a voice came out of the hall and said, “You don’t go to no Lodge to-night.” His voice was gone in a minute, He gasped and tried to speak; He tried to swear, but the drayman says That he couldn’t raise a squeak. And his mother-in-law rose slowly, And calmly she looked down On the green grass of the littered yard, With household treasures strewn. Yes, calmly on that dreadful scene She gazed, and looked around, And said to the weeping man by the gate, “Pick them things up off the ground.”