The Gascon lord, the village maid In death still clasp their hands; The love that levels rank and grade Unites their severed lands. What matter whose the hill-side grave, Or whose the blazoned stone? Forever to her western wave Shall whisper blue Garonne! O Love!--so hallowing every soil That gives thy sweet flower room, Wherever, nursed by ease or toil, The human heart takes bloom!-- Plant of lost Eden, from the sod Of sinful earth unriven, White blossom of the trees of God Dropped down to us from heaven!-- This tangled waste of mound and stone Is holy for thy sake; A sweetness which is all thy own Breathes out from fern and brake. And while ancestral pride shall twine The Gascon's tomb with flowers, Fall sweetly here, O song of mine, With summer's bloom and showers! And let the lines that severed seem Unite again in thee, As western wave and Gallic stream Are mingled in one sea! * * * * * GALA-DAYS. I. Once there was a great noise in our house,--a thumping and battering and grating. It was my own self dragging my big trunk down from the garret. I did it myself because I wanted it done. If I had said, "Halicarnassus, will you fetch my trunk down?" he would have asked me what trunk? and what did I want of it? and would not the other one be better? and couldn't I wait till after dinner?--and so the trunk would probably have had a three-days' journey from garret to basement. Now I am strong in the wrists and weak in the temper; therefore I used the one and spared the other, and got the trunk down-stairs myself. Halicarnassus heard the uproar. He must have been deaf not to hear it; for the old ark banged and bounced, and scraped the paint off the stairs, and pitched head-foremost into the wall, and gouged out the plastering, and dinted the mop-board, and was the most stupid, awkward, uncompromising, unmanageable thing I ever got hold of in my life. By the time I had zigzagged it into the back chamber, Halicarnassus loomed up the back stairs. I stood hot and panting, with the inside of my fingers tortured into burning leather, the skin rasped off three knuckles, and a bruise on the back of my right hand, where the trunk had crushed it against a sharp edge of the door-way. "Now, then?" said Halicarnassus interrogatively. "To be sure," I replied affirmatively. He said no more, but went and looked up the garret-stairs. They bore traces of a severe encounter, that must be confessed. "Do you want me to give you a bit of advice?" he asked. "No!" I answered promptly. "Well, then, here it is. The next time you design to bring a trunk downstairs, you would better cut away the underpinning, and knock out the beams, and let the garret down into the cellar. It will make less uproar, and not take so much to repair damages."