Poems Teachers Ask For - Various

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It seems but a little while Since he drilled a schoolboy army In a truly martial style, But now he's a man, a soldier, And we lend him a listening ear, For his heart is a heart all loyal, Unscourged by the curse of fear. His dad, when he told him, shuddered, His mother—God bless her!—cried; Yet, blest with a mother-nature, She wept with a mother-pride, But he whose old shoulders straightened Was Granddad—for memory ran To years when he, too, a youngster, Was changed by the Flag to a man! W.M. Herschell.

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Summer of 'sixty-three, sir, and Conrad was gone away—
Gone to the county-town, sir, to sell our first load of hay—
We lived in the log house yonder, poor as ever you've seen;
Roschen there was a baby, and I was only nineteen.
Conrad, he took the oxen, but he left Kentucky Belle.
How much we thought of Kentuck, I couldn't begin to tell—
Came from the Blue-Grass country; my father gave her to me
When I rode north with Conrad, away from the Tennessee.
Conrad lived in Ohio—a German he is, you know—
The house stood in broad cornfields, stretching on, row after row.
The old folks made me welcome; they were kind as kind could be;
But I kept longing, longing, for the hills of the Tennessee.
Oh, for a sight of water, the shadowed slope of a hill!
Clouds that hang on the summit, a wind that never is still!
But the level land went stretching away to meet the sky—
Never a rise, from north to south, to rest the weary eye!
From east to west, no river to shine out under the moon,
Nothing to make a shadow in the yellow afternoon:
Only the breathless sunshine, as I looked out, all forlorn;
Only the rustle, rustle, as I walked among the corn.
When I fell sick with pining, we didn't wait any more,
But moved away from the cornlands, out to this river shore—
The Tuscarawas it's called, sir—off there's a hill, you see—
And now I've grown to like it next best to the Tennessee.
I was at work that morning. Some one came riding like mad
Over the bridge and up the road—Farmer Rouf's little lad.
Bareback he rode; he had no hat; he hardly stopped to say,
"Morgan's men are coming, Frau; they're galloping on this way.
"I'm sent to warn the neighbors. He isn't a mile behind;
He sweeps up all the horses—every horse that he can find.
Morgan, Morgan the raider, and Morgan's terrible men,
With bowie knives and pistols, are galloping up the glen!"
The lad rode down the valley, and I stood still at the door;
The baby laughed and prattled, playing with spools on the floor;
Kentuck was out in the pasture; Conrad, my man, was gone.
Nearer, nearer, Morgan's men were galloping, galloping on!
Sudden I picked up baby, and ran to the pasture bar.
"Kentuck!" I called—"Kentucky!" She knew me ever so far!
I led her down the gully that turns off there to the right,
And tied her to the bushes; her head was just out of sight.
As I ran back to the log house, at once there came a sound—
The ring of hoofs, galloping hoofs, trembling over the ground—
Coming into the turnpike out from the White Woman Glen—
Morgan, Morgan the raider, and Morgan's terrible men.
As near they drew and nearer, my heart beat fast in alarm;
But still I stood in the doorway with baby on my arm.
They came, they passed; with spur and whip in haste they sped along—
Morgan, Morgan the raider, and his band, six hundred strong.