178 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



The Mortgaged Farm. 



The orchards have come to bearing — In billows of rosy bloom 

 Nestles the Settlers homestead — The fringes of gorse and broom 

 Glow golden against the sapphire — The meadows that seaward sweep, 

 Tuneful with bells and drowsy with bleatings of full fed sheep, 

 Are sweet with the clover's incense — Roses climb to the eaves- 

 Drunken with sweets, the sea winds sleep in the maple leaves. 



And you have bought up the mortgage ? Man, but that was not dear! 



A dollar we'll say per acre, and twenty for every year 



It took those two to clear it. That matters but little now, 



She has the peace she prayed for, and he has rest from the plough. 



And you ? Being free from a mortgage, you'll make the old farm pay 



Managed by modern methods, worked in a business way. 



Let us go back to the slashing where you heard the pheasant crow, 

 Where under the fallen giants the dog-tooth -violets grow, 

 Deers-foot and ladies slippers, the only flowers which grew 

 To deck my lady's parlour when that old house was new: 

 When he was digging "borders," and she, with mother's care, 

 Tending her "slips" from England, the planting of each a prayer 

 For a home like that home she came from — There is the fight he won : 

 Here is the field he died on, the work that he left half done. 



Can you not see them bending over the crosscut saw, 

 Love their only possession, labour their daily law: 

 The Douglas leaning slowly, its topmost limbs asway 

 To rush to earth a ruin, in clouds of woodland spray — 

 See them, close together, their own lives on the wane, 

 Counting the years her roses will take to her window pane, 

 See the dreams that they lived for, the pictures fancy drew 

 Of fields they never finished, of folds they never knew. 



Aye, you have bought a bargain with human lives thrown in, 



Their fields to bear the harvests your reaper folk shall win, 



But the dream which those folk fashioned has not been bought or sold. 



When Spring is most impassioned, when gorse is virgin gold, 



When grass is living emerald and evening seas afire, 



When pines are full of music as youth with love's desire, 



You shall feel an unseen presence, shall hear a heart in tune 



With the glory of her roses, with the peace of early June — 



You shall balance fact with fiction, their dream against your dross 



The profits of your purchase, the requitals for their loss. 



