Literary Monthly, 1897.

RECOMPENSE

CHARLES P. PARKHURST ’98

  At dawn he toils the steep to gain the flower,
    The lure that beckons from the height afar;
  Noon wanes to eve, the bloom has fled, but lo! 
    High in the purple night there gleams a star.

Literary Monthly, 1897.

CERVERA AT ANNAPOLIS

HENRY R. CONGER ’99

  They crowded round to see him, great and small,
  The conquered admiral of a conquered fleet,
  Shorn of his glories, thrown from his high seat,
  Great by the very greatness of his fall. 
  Hope, honor, fortune, lost beyond recall,
  Greyhaired and bitter-hearted; doomed to meet
  His country’s censure, sharper than defeat;
  His foeman’s pity—­that was worst of all.

  He heard them faintly, as one hears, amuse,
  Amid his vision voices far away
  That call him from sad dreams to sadder day;
  For he was where he would be could he choose,
  At peace beneath the waters of the bay,
  Where all his ships lay silent with their crews.

Literary Monthly, 1898.

THE ANSWER

DWIGHT W. MARVIN ’01

  I wondered why the western hills were always smiling so,
  Until one evening when the heavens were like a fiery sea;
  For, as the Sun crept down the sky amid the sunset-glow,
  He paused upon the western hills, and kissed them tenderly.

Literary Monthly, 1900.

ONE OF THE PLODDERS

HARRY JAMES SMITH ’02

Through the gathering gloom of a summer evening a young man walked wearily up the dusty road toward the Waring farmhouse.  In each hand he carried a brimming pail and as he stepped along the milk in them flopped softly against their tin sides.  Out from the white streak of sky behind his figure stood strongly relieved in silhouette, large, stooping, dispirited.  The whole attitude was one of extreme fatigue, though for the silence and automatic movement of him you might almost think him a piece of ambulatory mechanism.  Once or twice, to be sure, he turned his head, perhaps to look off over the cultivated fields and to calculate the labor still to be put on them, or possibly to draw a sort of unconscious, tired satisfaction from these encouraging results of so many weary hours.  At any rate his pace never altered.  Overhead the large maple trees reached their glooming branches in a mysterious, impenetrable canopy that rustled softly in the dusky silence.  For the night was still, despite the squeaking of katydids and the distant peep of frogs.  Along the sides of the road as it stretched on ahead like a brownish ribbon and vanished under the farther trees, ran stone walls, low and massive, and sharply hemming in the dusty highway from the cool, green fields beyond.