ng hand is yours;
And how awkward, rude and great
Mine, as you manipulate!
Wonderfully cool and calm
Are the touches of your palm
To my fingers, as they rest
In their rosy, cosey nest,
While your own, with deftest skill,
Dance and caper as they will,--
Armed with instruments that seem
Gathered from some fairy dream--
Tiny spears, and simitars
Such as pixy armorers
Might have made for jocund fays
To parade on holidays,
And flash round in dewy dells,
Lopping down the lily-bells;
Or in tilting, o'er the leas,
At the clumsy bumblebees,
Splintering their stings, perchance,
As the knights in old romance
Snapped the spears of foes that fought
In the jousts at Camelot!
Smiling? Dainty Manicure?--
'Twould delight me, but that you're
Simply smiling, as I see,
At my nails and not at me!
Haply this is why they glow
And light up and twinkle so!

A CALLER FROM BOONE

BENJ. F. JOHNSON VISITS THE EDITOR

It was a dim and chill and loveless afternoon in the late fall of
eighty-three when I first saw the genial subject of this hasty sketch.
From time to time the daily paper on which I worked had been
receiving, among the general literary driftage of amateur essayists,
poets and sketch-writers, some conceits in verse that struck the
editorial head as decidedly novel; and, as they were evidently the
production of an unlettered man, and an _old_ man, and a farmer at that,
they were usually spared the waste-basket, and preserved--not for
publication, but to pass from hand to hand among the members of the
staff as simply quaint and mirth-provoking specimens of the verdancy
of both the venerable author and the Muse inspiring him. Letters as
quaint as were the poems invariably accompanied them, and the oddity
of these, in fact, had first called attention to the verses. I well
remember the general merriment of the office when the first of the old
man's letters was read aloud, and I recall, too, some of his comments
on his own verse, verbatim. In one place he said: "I make no doubt you
will find some purty _sad_ spots in my poetry, considerin'; but I hope
you will bear in mind that I am a great sufferer with rheumatizum, and
have been, off and on, sence the cold New Year's. In the main,
however," he continued, "I allus aim to write in a cheerful,
comfortin' sperit, so's ef the stuff hangs fire, and don't do no g