The Days of a Man 1895 



While round about thee, long as death shall be, 

 Thou hear'st strange voices, ghastly shriek and twinge, 

 Thje grisly horror of a rusty hinge?" 



love and At Mazatlan also I wrote a poem l to my little 

 science daughter Barbara, which I called a study in heredity. 

 For in it I sought to trace the origin of the black 

 eyes she had inherited from her mother and grand- 

 father Knight, but which, I felt sure, must have 

 descended from a racial source outside of or back 

 of my wife's New England ancestry. I therefore 

 imagined that some forgotten rover from San 

 Sebastian in Spain had joined his blood to that of 

 the Puritan folk. As a matter of fact I later learned 

 that the black eyes and olive skin went back through 

 the Knight-Worden line to a Huguenot maid and 

 her father, who fled from France to England to 

 escape religious persecution. 



To BARBARA 







Little lady, cease your play 

 For a moment, if you may; 

 Come to me, and tell me true 

 Whence those black eyes came to you. 



Father's eyes are granite gray, 

 And your mother's, Barbara, 

 Black as the obsidian stone, 

 With a luster all their own. 

 How should one so small as you 

 Learn to choose between the two? 



* 



If through father's eyes you look, 

 Nature seems an open book 

 All her secrets written clear 

 On her pages round you, dear. 

 1 Published in The Popular Science Monthly for August, 1895. 



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