Page 218 - The model orator, or, Young folks' speaker : containing the choicest recitations and readings from the best authors for schools, public entertainments, social gatherings, Sunday schools, etc. : including recitals in prose and verse ...

And we with lightsome hardihood, dismissing idle care,
Sat down to eat and drink and laugh over our dainty tare.

The laugh was loud around the board, the jesting wild and light;
But J was fevered with the march, and drank no wine that night;
1 just had filled a single cup, when through my very brain
Stung, sharper than a serpent's tooth, an infant's cry of pain.

Through all that heat of revelry, through all that boisterous cheer,
To every heart its feeble moan picrced, like a frozen spear.
“Aye,” shrieked the woman, darting up, “ I pray yon trust again
A widow’s )i ospitahty in our unyielding Spain,
“ Helpless and hopeless, by the light of God Himself I swore
To treat you as you treated him— that body on the floor.
Yon secret place 1 filled, to feel, t hat If ye did not spare,
The treasure of a dread revenge was ready hidden there,

(iA mother’s love is deep, no doubt ; ye did not phrase it ill,
But in your hunger ye forgot that hale is deeper still.
The Spanish woman speaks for Spain ; for her butchered love, the wife,
To tell you that an hour is all my vintage leaves of life."

I cannot paint the many forms of wild despair put on,
Nor coiint (he crowded brave who sleep beneath a single stone;
I can but tell you how, before that horrid hour went by,
I saw the murderess beneath the self-avengers die.
But though upon her v/rde lied simbs they leaped like beasts of prey,
And with fierce hands, like madmen, tore the quivering lire away—
Triumphant hate and joyous scorn, without a trace of p;iin.
Burned to the last, like sullen stars, in that haughty eye of Spain.

And often now it breaks my rest, the tumult vague and wild,
Drifting, like storm-tossed clouds, around the mother and her child—
o 1
While she, distinct in raiment white, stands silently the while,
;\nd sheds through torn and bleeding hair the same unchanging smile.

Sra F kakcjs H a s t in g s D o y l e.