You know the shout that would ring out before us down the glade, And start the blue jays like a flight of arrows through the shade, And sift the thin pine needles down like slanting, shining rain, And send the squirrels scampering back to their holes again, Until we saw, blue-veiled and dim, or leaping like desire, That flame of twenty years ago, which lit the old camp-fire. And then that rest on Nature's breast, when talk had dropped, and slow The night wind went from tree to tree with challenge soft and low! We lay on lazy elbows propped, or stood to stir the flame, Till up the soaring redwood's shaft our shadows danced and came, As if to draw us with the sparks, high o'er its unseen spire, To the five stars that kept their ward above the old camp-fire,-- Those picket stars whose tranquil watch half soothed, half shamed our sleep. What recked we then what beasts or men around might lurk or creep? We lay and heard with listless ears the far-off panther's cry, The near coyote's snarling snap, the grizzly's deep-drawn sigh, The brown bear's blundering human tread, the gray wolves' yelping choir Beyond the magic circle drawn around the old camp-fire. And then that morn! Was ever morn so filled with all things new? The light that fell through long brown aisles from out the kindling blue, The creak and yawn of stretching boughs, the jay-bird's early call, The rat-tat-tat of woodpecker that waked the woodland hall, The fainter stir of lower life in fern and brake and brier, Till flashing leaped the torch of Day from last night's old camp-fire! Well, well! we'll see it once again; we should be near it now; It's scarce a mile to where the trail strikes off to skirt the slough, And then the dip to Indian Spring, the wooded rise, and--strange! Yet here should stand the blasted pine that marked our farther range; And here--what's this? A ragged swab of ruts and stumps and mire! Sure this is not the sacred grove that hid the old camp-fire! Yet here's the "blaze" I cut myself, and there's the stumbling ledge, With quartz "outcrop" that lay atop, now leveled to its edge, And mounds of moss-grown stumps beside the woodman's rotting chips, And gashes in the hillside, that gape with dumb red lips. And yet above the shattered wreck and ruin, curling higher-- Ah yes!--still lifts the smoke that marked the welcome old camp-fire! Perhaps some friend of twenty years still lingers there to raise To weary hearts and tired eyes that beacon of old days. Perhaps but stay; 'tis gone! and yet once more it lifts as though To meet our tardy blundering steps, and seems to MOVE, and lo! Whirls by us in a rush of sound,--the vanished funeral pyre Of hopes and fears that twenty years burned in the old camp-fire!