VILLAGE MYSTERY

The woman in the pointed hood

And cloak blue-gray like a pigeon's wing,

Whose orchard climbs to the balsam-wood,

Has done a cruel thing.

To her back door-step came a ghost,

A girl who had been ten years dead,

She stood by the granite hitching-post

And begged for a piece of bread.

Now why should I, who walk alone,

Who am ironical and proud,

Turn, when a woman casts a stone

At a beggar in a shroud?

I saw the dead girl cringe and whine,

And cower in the weeping air —

But, oh, she was no kin of mine,

And so I did not care!