A RUINED COTTAGE IN THE HIGHLANDS.
{" EXSILINDE DOMOS ET DITLCIA MUTANT."]
THE beam says to the rafter, We are crazy and old : The hearth says to the chimney, We are blackened and cold : The door says to the window, We shut not out the rain : And the whole place is accursed, it reeks of wrong and pain.
Yet the burn flows on the mountain, still limpid and fleet : And the wind sings in the fir-tree, with song still as sweet : And the grouse crows on the hill-top, the first to greet the day: And the deer strays in the forest, with its young one at play.
But where now is the tartan, with the clansman of old, Who stalked once in Lochaver, with step free and bold ? He is lord now of a prairie, he cannot count his sheep : But his heart still is Lochaver's; he returns there in sleep.
Then his foot brushes the heather, where it purples the moor, With the light heart of the hunter, in the chase as of yore; With the proud step of his fathers, as he roams o'er hill and glen ; 0 fair mother of heroes, who shall match thee for men ?
They have wrung wealth in Iowa, with the steam-horse and plough : They have crushed gold in Alaska with the sweat of their brow : But the true wealth of a people is the home with its loves and tears, Where the dead lie, and the heart lives, by the tombs of a thousand years. Then roll, waters of Yukon, your reefs rich in gold !
Grow white greenest of prairies with fleeces untold!
But his heart still is Lochaver's, in the cot wi h the "but ant) ben ; " They have deer still in Lochaver, but—where are the men?
They were torn up from the ahieling, that cradled their birth They were chased forth into exile, as strangers on earth : Oh, how shall they sing the old songs they learnt when the heart was young, When the minstrel spirit is broken, and the harp is an unstrung ?
There are snowpeaks in the Far West, sierras that cut the sky ; Like the white clouds of the summer that dazzle the eagle's eye: But it's Oh for the hills of Scotland, for the mist, and glow, and gloom, And the far cry of the curlew, and the heather in bloom !
A. G. BL
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