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Stedman and Hutchinson, comps. A Library of American Literature:
An Anthology in Eleven Volumes. 1891.
Vols. IX–XI: Literature of the Republic, Part IV., 1861–1889

A Picture

By Charles Gamage Eastman (1816–1860)

THE FARMER sat in his easy chair

Smoking his pipe of clay,

While his hale old wife with busy care

Was clearing the dinner away;

A sweet little girl with fine blue eyes

On her grandfather’s knee was catching flies.

The old man laid his hand on her head,

With a tear on his wrinkled face;

He thought how often her mother, dead,

Used to sit in the self-same place;

As the tear stole down from his half-shut eye,

“Don’t smoke!” said the child, “how it makes you cry!”

The house-dog lay, stretched out on the floor

Where the shade after noon used to steal,

The busy old wife by the open door

Was turning the spinning-wheel,

And the old brass clock on the mantletree

Had plodded along to almost three.

Still the farmer sat in his easy chair,

While close to his heaving breast

The moistened brow and the check so fair

Of his sweet grandchild were pressed;

His head, bent down, on her soft hair lay:

Fast asleep were they both, that summer day!