Book-bot.com - read famous books online for free

The Haunted Hour - An Anthology by Various
page 127 of 244 (52%)
But her spirit lives, and her soul is part
Of this sad old house by the sea.

Her lover was fickle and fine and French;
It was more than a hundred years ago
When he sailed away from her arms,--poor wench!--
With the Admiral Rochambeau.

I marvel much what periwigged phrase
Won the heart of this sentimental Quaker,
At what gold-laced speech of those modish days
She listened,--the mischief take her!

But she kept the posies of mignonette
That he gave; and ever as their bloom failed
And faded (though with her tears still wet)
Her youth with their own exhaled.

Till one night when the sea fog wrapped a shroud
Round spar and spire and tarn and tree,
Her soul went up on that lifted cloud
From this sad old house by the sea.

And ever since then, when the clock strikes two,
She walks unbidden from room to room,
And the air is filled as she passes through
With a subtle, sad perfume.

The delicate odor of mignonette,
The ghost of a dead-and-gone bouquet,
DigitalOcean Referral Badge