As he looked at the play from the theatre box;
And it seemed to me that the sound I heard,
As the audience fluttered, like ducks round decoy,
Was only the buzz of a musical word
That I cannot get rid of--'Nanjemoy.'"

"Twenty miles we must ride before day,
Cross Mattawoman, Piscataway,
If in the morn we would take to the woods
In the swamp of Zekiah, at Doctor Mudd's!"
"Quaint are the names," thought the outlaw then,
"Though much I have mingled with Maryland men!
I have fever, I think, or my mind's o'erthrown.
Though scraped is the flesh by this broken bone,
Every jog that I take on this road so lonely,
With thoughts, aye bloody, my mind to employ,
I can but say, over and over, this only--
The drowsy, melodious 'Nanjemoy.'"

Silent they galloped by broken gates,
By slashes of pines around old estates;
By planters' graves afield under clumps
Of blackjack oaks and tobacco stumps;
The empty quarters of negroes grin
From clearings of cedar and chinquopin;
From fodder stacks the wild swine flew,
The shy young wheat the frost peeped through,
And the swamp owl hooted as if she knew
Of the crime, as she hailed: "Ahoy! Ahoy!"
And the chiming hoofs of the horses drew
The pitiless rhythm of "Nanjemoy."

So in the dawn as perturbed and gray
They hid in the farm-house off the way,
And the worn assassin dozed in his chair,
A voice in his dreams or afloat in the air,
Like a spirit born in the Indian corn--
Immemorial, vague, forlorn,
And disembodied--murmured forever
The name of the old creek up the river.
"God of blood!" he said unto Herold,
As they groped in the dusk, lost and imperilled,
In the oozy, entangled morass and mesh
Of hanging vines over Allen's Fresh:
"The chirp of birds and the drone of frogs,
The lizards and crickets from trees and bogs
Follow me yet, pursue and ferret
My soul with a word which I used to enjoy,
As if it had turned on me like a spirit
And stabbed my ear with its 'Nanjemoy.'"

Ay! Great Nature fury or preacher
Makes, as she wists, of the tiniest creature--
Arming a word, as it floats on the mind,
With the dagger of wrath and the wing of the wind.
What, though weighted to take them down,
Their swimming steeds in the river they drown,
And paddle the farther shore