There is the ancient family chest,
There the ancestral cards and hatchel;
Dorothy, sighing, sinks down to rest,
Forgetful of patches, sage, and satchel.
Ghosts of faces peer from the gloom
Of the chimney, where with swifts and reel,
And the long-disused, dismantled loom,
Stands the old-fashioned spinning-wheel.
She sees it back in the clean-swept kitchen,
A part of her girlhood's little world;
Her mother is there by the window, stitching;
Spindle buzzes, and reel is whirled
With many a click: on her little stool
She sits, a child, by the open door,
Watching, and dabbling her feet in the pool
Of sunshine spilled on the gilded floor
Her sisters are spinning all day long;
To her wakening sense the first sweet warning
Of daylight come is the cheerful song
To the hum of the wheel in the early morning.
Benjie, the gentle, red-cheeked boy.
On his way to school, peeps in at the gate;
In neat white pinafore, pleased and coy,
She reaches a hand to her bashful mate;
And under the elms, a prattling pair.
Together they go, through glimmer and gloom:--
It all comes back to her, dreaming there
In the low-raftered garret room;
The hum of the wheel, and the summer weather.
The heart's first trouble, and love's beginning,
Are all in her memory linked together;
And now it is she herself that is spinning.
With the bloom of youth on cheek and lip.
Turning the spokes with the flashing pin,
Twisting the thread from the spindle-tip,
Stretching it out and winding it in.
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