Let me like the righteous die,
  Let my last end be like his;
When I close, on earth, my eye,
  Let me wake in realms of bliss.

STANZAS

    Read at the celebration of the seventy-second anniversary of the
    birthday of Joseph Steele, Dec. 13, 1884.

Dear friends and neighbors, one and all,
  I’m pleased to meet you here to-day;
’Tis nice for neighbors thus to call,
  In such a social way.

We meet to celebrate a day,
  Which people seldom see;
Time flies so rapidly away
  ’Tis like a dream to me;

Since I, a lad with flaxen hair
  First met our friend, so gray;
We both were free from thought and care,
  But full of hope and play.

Well Joseph Steele, we may be glad
  That we are here to-day,
Although it makes me somewhat sad
  To think of friends away.

Of all our schoolboy friends but few
  Alas! can now be found,
Not many but myself and you
  Are still above the ground.

I count upon my fingers’ ends
  About the half, I know. 
Of all acquaintances and friends
  With whom we used to go;

To Humphreys and Montgomery
  To Cochran and to Dance,
And some, who slip my memory,
  That used to make us prance,

Whene’er we missed a lesson
  Or placed a crooked pin
Just where some one would press on
  Enough to drive it in.

O, it was fun alive, I vow,
  To see that fellow bounce
And hear him howl and make a row
  And threaten he would trounce

The boy that did the mischief,
  But that boy was seldom found,
And so, he had to bear his grief
  And nurse the unseen wound;

But time and rhyme can never tell
  The half our funny pranks,
And that we ever learned to spell,
  We ought to render thanks.

Poor Dance!  I always pitied him
  For he was just from college,
And never having learned to swim,
  Was drowned with all his knowledge.

Of Cochran, I but little knew,
  He was a stranger here,
’Twas always said he would get blue,
  And acted very queer.

Montgomery I knew right well,
  He was rather kind than cross,
He taught the willing how to spell,
  And always would be boss.

He wrote a very pretty hand
  And could command a school: 
His appetite got the command,
  And that he could not rule.

One day he took a heavy slug
  Of something rather hot;
He took that something from a jug,
  And shortly he was not.

Who “took” him, though, I never can
  Nor need I ever say;
But when the Lord doth take a man,
  ’Tis seldom done that way.

Poor Humphreys was a sort of crank
  (Folks said his learning made him mad,)
But this I know, he always drank,
  And that will make the best man, bad.