One wife in Natchez-under-the-Hill
And another one here, in Pike;
A keerless man in his talk was Jim,
And an awkward hand in a row,
But he never flunked, and he never lied,-
I reckon he never knowed how.

And this was all the religion he had,—

To treat his engine well;

Never be passed on the river;

To mind the pilot's bell;

And if ever the Prairie Belle took fire,

A thousand times he swore
He'd hold her nozzle agin the bank
Till the last soul got ashore.

All boats has their day on the Mississip,
And her day come at last,-

The Movastar was a better boat,

But the Belle she wouldn't be passed. And so she came tearin' along that nightThe oldest craft on the line

With a nigger squat on her safety-valve, And her furnace crammed, rosin and pine.

The fire bust out as she clared the bar,
And burnt a hole in the night,

And quick as a flash she turned, and made
For that willer-bank on the right.

There was runnin' and cursin', but Jim yelled out,

Over all the infernal roar,

"I'll hold her nozzle agin the bank

Till the last galoot's ashore."

Through the hot, black breath of the burnin' boat
Jim Bludso's voice was heard,

And they all had trust in his cussedness,
And knowed he would keep his word.
And, sure's you're born, they all got off
Afore the smokestacks fell,-
And Bludso's ghost went up alone
In the smoke of the Prairie Belle.

He weren't no saint,—but at jedgment
I'd run my chance with Jim,
'Longside of some pious gentlemen

That wouldn't shook hands with him.
He seen his duty, a dead-sure thing,—
And went for it thar and then;
And Christ ain't a going to be too hard
On a man that died for men.

LIBERTY

JOHN HAY

WHAT man is there so bold that he should say,
"Thus, and thus only, would I have the Sea?"
For whether lying calm and beautiful,

Clasping the earth in love, and throwing back
The smile of Heaven from waves of amethyst;
Or whether, freshened by the busy winds,
It bears the trade and navies of the world
To ends of use or stern activity;

Or whether, lashed by tempests, it gives way

To elemental fury, howls and roars

At all its rocky barriers, in wild lust

Of ruin drinks the blood of living things,

And strews its wrecks o'er leagues of desolate shore,

Always it is the Sea, and men bow down

Before its vast and varied majesty.

So all in vain will timorous ones essay
To set the metes and bounds of Liberty.
For Freedom is its own eternal law:
It makes its own conditions, and in storm
Or calm alike fulfills the unerring Will.
Let us not then despise it when it lies
Still as a sleeping lion, while a swarm
Of gnat-like evils hover round its head;

Nor doubt it when in mad, disjointed times

It shakes the torch of terror, and its cry

Shrills o'er the quaking earth, and in the flame

Of riot and war we see its awful form

Rise by the scaffold, where the crimson axe

Rings down its grooves the knell of shuddering kings.
For ever in thine eyes, O Liberty,

Shines that high light whereby the world is saved,
And though thou slay us, we will trust in thee!

PLAIN LANGUAGE FROM TRUTHFUL JAMES

FRANCIS BRET HARTE

WHICH I wish to remark,-
And my language is plain,—
That for ways that are dark

And for tricks that are vain,

The heathen Chinee is peculiar,

Which the same I would rise to explain.

Ah Sin was his name;

And I shall not deny

In regard to the same

Which that name might imply,

But his smile it was pensive and childlike,
As I frequent remarked to Bill Nye.

It was August the third;

And quite soft was the skies; Which it might be inferred

That Ah Sin was likewise;

Yet he played it that day upon William
And me in a way I despise.

Which we had a small game,
And Ah Sin took a hand:
It was Euchre. The same

He did not understand;

But he smiled as he sat by the table,

With the smile that was childlike and bland.

Yet the cards they were stocked

In a way that I grieve,

And my feelings were shocked

At the state of Nye's sleeve:

Which was stuffed full of aces and bowers, And the same with intent to deceive.

But the hands that were played

By that heathen Chinee, And the points that he made,

Were quite frightful to see,

Till at last he put down a right bower,
Which the same Nye had dealt unto me.