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[118] Alack! alas! this month or more
We've felt a sad foreboding;
Our very dreams the burden bore
Of central cliques exploding;
Before our eyes a furnace shone,
Where heads of dough were roasting,
And one we took to be your own
The traitor Hale was toasting!
Our Belknap brother1 heard with awe
The Congo minstrels playing;
At Pittsfield Reuben Leavitt2 saw
The ghost of Storrs a-praying;
And Carroll's woods were sad to see,
With black-winged crows a-darting;
And Black Snout looked on Ossipee,
New-glossed with Day and Martin.
We thought the ‘ Old Man of the Notch’
His face seemed changing wholly—
His lips seemed thick; his nose seemed flat;
His misty hair looked woolly;
And Coos teamsters, shrieking, fled
From the metamorphosed figure.
‘Look there!’ they said, “the Old Stone Head
Himself is turning nigger!”
The schoolhouse,3 out of Canaan hauled
Seemed turning on its track again,
And like a great swamp-turtle crawled
To Canaan village back again,
Shook off the mud and settled flat
Upon its underpinning;
1 The senatorial editor of the Belknap Gazette all along manifested a peculiar horror of ‘niggers’ and ‘nigger parties.’
2 The justice before whom Elder Storrs was brought for preaching abolition on a writ drawn by Hon. M. N., Jr., of Pittsfield. The sheriff served the writ while the elder was praying.
3 The academy at Canaan, N. H., received one or two colored scholars, and was in consequence dragged off into a swamp by Democratic teams.
Boston and New York, Houghton, Mifflin and company, 1888-89.
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