THE ROOM BENEATH THE RAFTERS.

Sometimes when I have dropped to sleep,

Draped in a soft luxurious gloom,

Across my drowsing mind will creep

The memory of another room,

Where resinous knots in roof boards made

A frescoing of light and shade,

And sighing poplars brushed their leaves

Against the humbly sloping eaves.

Again I fancy, in my dreams,

I’ m lying in my trundle bed;

I seem to see the bare old beams

And unhewn rafters overhead.

The mud wasp’ s shrill falsetto hum

I hear again, and see him come

Forth from his dark-walled hanging house,

Dressed in his black and yellow blouse.

There, summer dawns, in sleep I stirred,

And wove into my fair dream’ s woof

The chattering of a martin bird,

Or rain-drops pattering on the roof.

Or half awake, and half in fear,

I saw the spider spinning near

His pretty castle where the fly

Should come to ruin by-and-by.

And there I fashioned from my brain

Youth’ s shining structures in the air.

I did not wholly build in vain,

For some were lasting, firm and fair.

And I am one who lives to say

My life has held more gold than gray,

And that the splendor of the real

Surpassed my early dream’ s ideal.

But still I love to wander back

To that old time and that old place;

To tread my way o’ er memory’ s track,

And catch the early morning grace,

In that quaint room beneath the rafter,

That echoed to my childish laughter;

To dream again the dreams that grew

More beautiful as they came true.