And white with apple-blossoms blown like snow. 
Beyond the plain a lower chain of hills,
In summer gemmed with fields of golden grain
Set in the emerald of the beechen woods. 
In other days the village school-house stood
Below our cottage on a grassy mound
That sloped away unto the river’s marge;
And on the slope a cluster of tall pines
Crowning a copse of beech and evergreen. 
There in my boyhood days I went to school;
A maiden mistress ruled the little realm;
She taught the rudiments to rompish rogues,
And walked a queen with magic wand of birch. 
My years were hardly ten when father died. 
Sole tenants of our humble cottage home
My sorrowing mother and myself remained;
But she was all economy, and kept
With my poor aid a comfortable house. 
I was her idol and she wrought at night
To keep me at my books, and used to boast
That I should rise above our humble lot. 
How oft I listened to her hopeful words—­
Poured from the fountain of a mother’s heart
Until I longed to wing the sluggard years
That bore me on to what I hoped to be.

“We had a garden-plat behind the house—­
Beyond, an orchard and a pasture-lot;
In front a narrow meadow—­here and there
Shaded with elms and branching butternuts. 
In spring and summer in the garden-plat
I wrought my morning and my evening hours
And kept myself at school—­no idle boy.

“One bright May morning when the robins sang
There came to school a stranger queenly fair,
With eyes that shamed the ethereal blue of heaven,
And golden hair in ringlets—­cheeks as soft,
As fresh and rosy as the velvet blush
Of summer sunrise on the dew-damp hills. 
Hers was the name I muttered in my dreams. 
For days my bashful heart held me aloof
Although her senior by a single year;
But we were brought together oft in class,
And when she learned my name she spoke to me,
And then my tongue was loosed and we were friends. 
Before the advent of the steeds of steel
Her sire—­a shrewd and calculating man—­
Had lately come and purchased timbered-lands
And idle mills, and made the town his home. 
And he was well-to-do and growing rich,
And she her father’s pet and only child. 
In mind and stature for two happy years
We grew together at the village school. 
We grew together!—­aye, our tender hearts
There grew together till they beat as one. 
Her tasks were mine, and mine alike were hers;
We often stole away among the pines—­
That stately cluster on the sloping hill—­
And conned our lessons from the selfsame book,
And learned to love each other o’er our tasks,
While in the pine-tops piped the oriole,
And from his branch the chattering squirrel chid
Our guileless love and artless innocence. 
’Twas childish love perhaps, but day by day
It grew into our souls as we grew up. 
Then there was opened in the prospering town