And then that morn! Was ever morn so filled with all things new?
The light that fell through long brown aisles from out the kindling
blue,
The creak and yawn of stretching boughs, the jay-bird's early call,
The rat-tat-tat of woodpecker that waked the woodland hall,
The fainter stir of lower life in fern and brake and brier,
Till flashing leaped the torch of Day from last night's old camp-fire!
Well, well! we'll see it once again; we should be near it now;
It's scarce a mile to where the trail strikes off to skirt the slough,
And then the dip to Indian Spring, the wooded rise, and--strange!
Yet here should stand the blasted pine that marked our farther range;
And here--what's this? A ragged swab of ruts and stumps and mire!
Sure this is not the sacred grove that hid the old camp-fire!
Yet here's the "blaze" I cut myself, and there's the stumbling ledge,
With quartz "outcrop" that lay atop, now leveled to its edge,
And mounds of moss-grown stumps beside the woodman's rotting chips,
And gashes in the hillside, that gape with dumb red lips.
And yet above the shattered wreck and ruin, curling higher--
Ah yes!--still lifts the smoke that marked the welcome old camp-fire!
Perhaps some friend of twenty years still lingers there to raise
To weary hearts and tired eyes that beacon of old days.
Perhaps but stay; 'tis gone! and yet once more it lifts as though
To meet our tardy blundering steps, and seems to MOVE, and lo!
Whirls by us in a rush of sound,--the vanished funeral pyre
Of hopes and fears that twenty years burned in the old camp-fire!
For see, beyond the prospect spreads, with chimney, spire, and roof,--
Two iron bands across the trail clank to our mustang's hoof;
Above them leap two blackened threads from limb-lopped tree to tree,
To where the whitewashed station speeds its message to the sea.
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