Have you heard the story the gossips tell
Of Burns of Gettysburg? No? Ah, well
Brief is the glory that hero earns,
Briefer the story of poor John Burns;
He was the fellow who won renown
The only man who did n't back down
When the rebels rode through his native town;
But held his own in the fight next day,
When all his townsfolk ran away.
That was in July, sixty-three,-
The very day that General Lee,
The flower of Southern chivalry,
Baffled and beaten, backward reeled
From a stubborn Meade and a barren field.
I might tell how, but the day before,
John Burns stood at his cottage-door,
Looking down the village street,
Where, in the shade of his peaceful vine,
He heard the low of his gathered kine,
And felt their breath with incense sweet;
Or, I might say, when the sunset burned
The old farm gable, he thought it turned
The milk that fell in a babbling flood
Into the milk-pail, red as blood;
Or, how he fancied the hum of bees
Were bullets buzzing among the trees.
But all such fanciful thoughts as these
Were strange to a practical man like Burns,
Who minded only his own concerns,
Troubled no more by fancies fine
Than one of his calm-eyed, long-tailed kine
Quite old-fashioned, and matter-of-fact,
Slow to argue, but quick to act.
That was the reason, as some folks say,
He fought so well on that terrible day.
And it was terrible. On the right
Raged for hours the heavy fight,
Thundered the battery's double bass-
Difficult music for men to face;
While on the left where now the graves
Undulate like the living waves
That all the day unceasing swept
Up to the pits the rebels kept —
Round shot plowed the upland glades,
Sown with bullets, reaped with blades;
Shattered fences here and there
Tossed their splinters in the air,
The very trees were stripped and bare;
The barns that once held yellow grain
Were heaped with harvests of the slain;
The cattle bellowed on the plain,
The turkeys screamed with might and main,
And brooding barn-fowl left their rest
With strange shells bursting in each nest.
Just where the tide of battle turns,
Erect and lonely, stood old John Burns.
How do you think the man was dressed?
He wore an ancient, long buff vest,
Yellow as saffron- but his best;
And, buttoned over his manly breast
Was a bright blue coat with a rolling collar,
And large gilt buttons — size of a dollar —
With tails that country-folk called "swaller."
He wore a broad-brimmed, bell-crowned hat,
White as the locks on which it sat.
Never had such a sight been seen.
For forty years on the village-green,
Since old John Burns was a country beau,
And went to the "quilting" long ago.
Close at his elbows, all that day
Veterans of the Peninsula,
Sunburnt and bearded, charged away,
And striplings, downy of lip and chin,--
Clerks that the Home Guard mustered in
Glanced as they passed at the hat he wore,
Then at the rifle his right hand bore,
And hailed him from out their youthful lore,
With scraps of a slangy répertoire:
"How are you, White Hat?" "Put her through!"
"Your head's level!" and, "Bully for you!"
Called him "Daddy "- and begged he 'd disclose
The name of the tailor who made his clothes,
And what was the value he set on those;
While Burns, unmindful of jeers and scoff,
Stood there picking the rebels off-
With his long, brown rifle and bell-crown hat,
And the swallow-tails they were laughing at.
'T was but a moment, for that respect
Which clothes all courage their voices checked;
And something the wildest could understand
Spake in the old man's strong right hand,
And his corded throat, and the lurking frown
Of his eyebrows under his old bell-crown;
Until, as they gazed, there crept an awe
Through the ranks in whispers, and some men saw,
In the antique vestments and long white hair
The Past of the Nation in battle there.
And some of the soldiers since declare
That the gleam of his old white hat afar,
Like the crested plume of the brave Navarre,
That day was their oriflamme of war.
Thus raged the battle. You know the rest:
How the rebels beaten, and backward pressed,
Broke at the final charge and ran.
At which John Burns a practical man,
Shouldered his rifle, unbent his brows,
And then went back to his bees and cows.
That is the story of old John Burns;
This is the moral the reader learns:
In fighting the battle, the question 's whether
You'll show a hat that's white, or a feather.
She is n't half so handsome as when twenty years agone,
At her old home in Piketon, Parson Avery made us one:
The great house crowded full of guests of every degree,
The girls all envying Hannah Jane, the boys all envying me.
Her fingers then were taper, and her skin as white as milk,
Her brown hair - what a mess it was! and soft and fine as silk; No wind-moved willow by a brook had ever such a grace,
The form of Aphrodite, with a pure Madonna face.
She had but meager schooling; her little notes to me,
Were full of crooked pothooks, and the worst orthography:
Her" dear" she spelled with double e and “kiss" with but one s: But when one's crazed with passion, what's a letter more ог less?
She blundered in her writing, and she blundered when she spoke,
And every rule of syntax that old Murray made, she broke;
But she was beautiful and fresh, and I—well, I was young;
Her form and face o'erbalanced all the blunders of her tongue.
I was but little better. True, I'd longer been at school;
My tongue and pen were run, perhaps, a little more by rule;
But that was all. The neighbors round, who both of us well
knew,
Said which I believed she was the better of the two.
All's changed; the light of seventeen 's no longer in her eyes;
Her wavy hair is gone- that loss the coiffeur's art supplies;
Her form is thin and angular; she slightly forward bends;
Her fingers once so shapely, now are stumpy at the ends.
She knows but very little, and in little are we one;
The beauty rare, that more than hid that great defect, is gone.
My parvenu relations now deride my homely wife,
And pity me that I am tied to such a clod for life.
I know there is a difference; at reception and levee,
The brightest, wittiest, and most famed of women smile on me;` And everywhere I hold my place among the greatest men;
And sometimes sigh, with Whittier's judge, "Alas! it might have been."
When they all crowd around me, stately dames and brilliant belles,
And yield to me the homage that all great success compels,
Discussing art and statecraft, and literature as well,
From Homer down to Thackeray, and Swedenborg on "Hell."
I can't forget that from these streams my wife has never quaffed, Has never with Ophelia wept, nor with Jack Falstaff laughed; Of authors, actors, artists — why, she hardly knows the names; She slept while I was speaking on the Alabama claims.
I can't forget-just at this point another form appears-
The wife I wedded as she was before my prosperous years;
I travel o'er the dreary road we traveled side by side,
And wonder what my share would be, if Justice should decide.
She had four hundred dollars left her from the old estate;
On that we married, and, thus poorly armored, faced our fate.
I wrestled with my books; her task was harder far than mine-
'T was how to make two hundred dollars do the work of nine.
At last I was admitted; then I had my legal lore,
An office with a stove and desk, of books perhaps a score;
She had her beauty and her youth, and some housewifely skill,
And love for me, and faith in me, and back of that a will.
Ah! how she cried for joy when my first legal fight was won, When our eclipse passed partly by, and we stood in the sun! The fee was fifty dollars—'t was the work of half a year First captive, lean and scraggy, of my legal bow and spear.
I well remember when my coat (the only one I had) Was seedy grown and threadbare, and, in fact, most "shocking bad."
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