The Singer heard their shouts the while,
    But her serene and haughty face
  Was lighted by no flattered smile
    Provoked by homage in that place.

  The Singer sang that night again
    In mother tones, tender and deep,
  Not to the public ear, but when
    She rocked her little one to sleep.

  The song we bless through all the years
    As memory’s holiest, sweetest thing,
  Instinct with pathos and with tears—­
    The song that mothers always sing.

  So tuneful was the lullaby
    The mother sang, her little child
  Cooed, oh! so sweetly in reply,
    Stretched forth its dimpled hands and smiled.

  The Singer crooning there above
    The cradle where her darling lay
  Snatched to her breast her smiling love
    And sang his soul to dreams away.

  Oh, mother-love, that knows no guile,
    That’s deaf to flatt’ry, blind to art,
  A dimpled hand hath wooed thy smile—­
    A baby’s cooing touched thy heart._

[Illustration:  JESSIE BARTLETT DAVIS.]

Lest my readers should conclude from these early specimens of Field’s fondness for lilting lullabies that the gentler sex and “mother love” blinded him to the manly attractions and true worth of his own sex, let the following never-to-be-forgotten ode to the waistcoat of the papa of the hero of the two preceding songs bear witness.  Mr. Davis has been a manager of first-class theatres and theatrical companies for a score of years, and there are thousands to testify that in the rhymes that follow Field has done no more than justice to the amazing “confections” in wearing apparel he affected in the days when we were boys together: 

  Of waistcoats there are divers kinds, from those severely chaste
  To those with fiery colors dight or with fair figures traced: 
  Those that high as liver-pads and chest-protectors serve,
  While others proudly sweep away in a substomachic curve,
  But the grandest thing in waistcoats in the streets in this great
      and wondrous west
  Is that which folks are wont to call the Will J. Davis vest!

  This paragon of comeliness is cut nor low nor high
  But just enough of both to show a bright imported tie: 
  Bound neatly with the choicest silks its lappets wave-like roll,
  While a watch-chain dangles sprucely from the proper buttonhole
  And a certain sensuous languor is ineffably expressed
  In the contour and the mise en scene of the Will J. Davis vest.

  Its texture is of softest silk:  Its colors, ah, how vain
  The task to name the splendid hues that in that vest obtain! 
  Go, view the rainbow and recount the glories of the sight
  And number all the radiances that in its glow unite,
  And then, when they are counted, with pride be it confessed
  They’re nil beside the splendor of the Will J. Davis vest.