DEAR LITTLE BROWN-EYED BESS.

A True Experience of Child-life.


I was working in my garden one day in the end of June,
The sun shone high in the clear blue sky, and the clock had just
struck noon;
I mused o'er my earliest childhood--my earliest friends, and lo,
There rose up the picture of a child in the dear dim Long-ago:
She holds in her arms a puppy, and smilingly shows it to me,
Her cheeks they are rosy and chubby, all dimpled with baby glee;
Her hair is dark and wavy, her brown eyes full of fun,
And she wears a blue straw bonnet to shelter from the sun.

She gathers daisies and kingcups till her pockets are more than
full,
And dreams of the far-away city where she soon must go to school;
Her home it is rustic and lonely in the land of the river Ness,
But she loves her rural dwelling, does dear little brown-eyed Bess.
One time--ah! how well I remember, it seems like yesterday,
Dear Bessie came to visit me, just nine years past last May:
Beneath the hawthorn blossoms, hearts full of childish bliss,
We vowed eternal friendship, and sealed it with a kiss;
And I plucked a bright pink rosebud to fasten in her dress--
She was six years old that summer, was dear little brown-eyed Bess.

I remember very little of all she said to me,
But I know we loved each other with childish love and free;
I remember romping gaily around some little ricks,