But the boss saw him loafing clear over the corn,
The next the boy heard was a shout;
And he wished for a moment he never was born
To mow all those fence-corners out.

Past the elder-bush blow it's five corners to mow,
To get to that burdock's green lug--
So he put on a spurt till the sweat blacked his shirt,
And he mowed his way in to the jug.

What cared the boy then for the boss in the corn
With a beaded brown jug at his feet,
While he pulled out the corn-cob as glad he was born
As the bobolink there in the wheat?

He unbuttoned his shirt and got on the top rail,
He hung his straw hat on the stake,
And he smiled to the hickory leaves' rustling tale,
As he gazed at that berry-bush brake.

Till chuck! went the scythe on a piece of old rail
That lifted clear out of its bunk;
And he said what he never had read in a tale,
To that innocent, rotten old chunk.

And then he heard something that never was sung,
That no bobolink could have said,
That never was rendered by pen or by tongue;
But it made his heart thump in his head,

As he let the scythe drop and he picked up the chunk,
And sneaked up as soft as a breeze,
And poked at the noise in that rotten rail's bunk
Till out came a bumble of bees.

Oh! the jug it was cool and the berries were red,
And sweet was the bobolink's strain;
But bumble-bee cups in a rotten rail's bed
Make a jug and a bobolink vain.

By noon at the nest there was only one bee,
And only one berry to pick,
And only one drink in the jug at the tree:
But that boy was as full as a tick.

They have torn the old zig-zag clear out of its snake,
And the bushes have gone up in fire;
The hickory stands but it's only a stake
To hold up a fiddle of wire.

The wires are strung tight for the fiddle is new,
And straight as a beam of the sun:
The plough slides along it, the wind whistles through,
And the fence-corner blue-grass is done.

The old mossy rails and green ivies are gone
With fifty grass crooks in a row--
But the bobolink sits on the wire and sings on--
The music he sang long ago.

And now 'mid the jostle and rush of the street,
That boy has his dreams in the day,
When he sits on the rail 'twixt the clover and wheat,
And mows out the fence-corner hay.

Whenever E. C. Drury whetted a scythe mowing fence corners he was, so