ON a stone by the wayside, half-naked and cold,

And soured in the struggle of life,

With his parchment envelope grown wrinkled and old,

Sat the Tramp, with his crust and his knife.

And the leaves of the forest fell round him in showers,—

And the sharp, stinging flurries of snow,

That had warned off the robins to summer bowers,

Admonished him, too, he should go.

But Autumn had gone, having gathered her sheaves,

And the glories of Summer were past;

And Spring, with the swallows that built in the eaves,

Had left him the weakest and last!

So he sat there alone, for the world could not heal

A disease without pain, without care,—

Without joy, without hope, too insensate to feel,—

Too utterly lost for despair!

But he thought, while the night, and the darkness, and gloom,

That gathered around him so fast,

Hid the moon and the stars in their cloud-shrouded tomb,

Of the fair, but the far-distant past!

And brightly the visions came gliding along

Through the warm golden gates of the day,—

With voices of childhood, and music and song,

Like echoes from lands far away.

And the glad ringing laughter of girlhood was there,

And one 'mong the others so dear

That o'er his life's record, too black for despair,

Flowed the sad sacred joy of a tear!

And he held, while he listened, his crust half consumed,

In his cold, shrivelled hand, growing weak,

While a glory shone round him that warmed and illumed

The few frozen tears on his cheek.

In the dark, silent night, thus his spirit had flown,

Like the sigh of a low passing breath;—

Life's bubble had burst, and another gone down

In the deep, shoreless ocean of death.

In the bright waking morn, by the side of the way,

On the crisp, frozen leaves shed around,

The knife, and the crust, and the casket of clay,

Which the tramp left behind him, were found!

And bound round his neck, as he lay there alone,

Was the image, both youthful and fair,

Of a sweet, laughing girl, with a blue ribbon zone,

And a single white rose in her hair.

Was he loved? Was she wed? Was she daughter or wife,

Or sister? The world may not read

Her story or his. They are lost with the life—

Recorded, "A tramp was found dead!"

"Found dead by the way!" whom a maiden's first love

Had hallowed—e'en worshipped in part,

And clothed in a light from the glory above,

To enshrine in her pure virgin heart!

Found dead, and alone, by the way where he died,

To be thrown, like a dog, in his lair!

Yet he peacefully sleeps, as the stone by his side,

And rich as the proud millionaire?