The widowed mothers and their brood: "Three days we tracked that dreary wild, Where thirst and anguish pressed us sore; And many a mother and her child We saw the vultures swooping down; "At length was heard a river sounding Among the maddened cattle rushing, "Hoarse-roaring, dark, the broad Gareep But that relentless robber clan Right through those waters wild and wan Nor staid to rescue wretches lost. L "All shivering from the foaming flood, We stood upon the stranger's ground, When, with proud looks and gestures rude, The white men gathered round: And there, like cattle from the fold, "My mother's scream, so long and shrill, My little sister's wailing cry, (In dreams I often hear them still!) A tiger's heart came to me then, 66 Away-away on bounding steeds The white man-stealers fleetly go, Through long low valleys fringed with reeds, Each with his captive, far and fast; "And tears and toil have been my lot Since I the white man's thrall became, And sorer griefs I wish forgot Harsh blows and burning shame. Oh, English chief! thou ne'er canst know When round his heart, like scorpions, cling Black thoughts, that madden while they sting? "Yet this hard fate I might have borne, And taught in time my soul to bend, Had my sad yearning breast forlorn But found a single friend: My race extinct or far removed, The boor's rough brood I could have loved- "While friendless thus, my master's flocks It chanced this fawn leapt from the rocks, I rescued it, though wounded sore, "Gently I nursed it; for I thought (Its hapless fate so like to mine) By good Utika it was brought, To bid me not repine Since in this world of wrong and ill “Thus lived I, a lone orphan lad, My task the proud boor's flocks to tend; To love, or call my friend; 'High swelled my heart!-But when the star Of midnight gleamed, I softly led My bounding favourite forth, and far And there, from human kind exiled, "But yester morn a Bushman brought Such was Marossi's touching tale, Our breasts they were not made of stone His words, his winning looks prevail We took him for "our own:" And one, with woman's gentle art, THE LAKE OF THE DISMAL SWAMP. AN AMERICAN LEGEND. BY THOMAS MOORE. "THEY made her a grave too cold and damp And she's gone to the Lake of the Dismal Swamp, "And her fire-fly lamp I soon shall see, And her paddle I soon shall hear ; Long and loving our life shall be, And I'll hide the maid in a cypress tree, Away to the Dismal Swamp he speeds - Through tangled juniper, beds of reeds, |