Page:Once a Week Jul - Dec 1859.pdf/61

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the castle, there they sit,

A happy group, this summer day:

But I, who cannot draw one bit,

Can sketch it too as well as they.

Yet if you saw my castle-sketch

You might begin to laugh or rail:

I own, indeed, it might not fetch

A price at Mr. Christie’s sale.

For, look. You find no donjon-keep,

No frowning arch, no stern old wall;

And where’s the moat, so broad and deep?

“It’s not,” you say, “the thing at all.

“You’ve tried to draw an English cot,

A cottage set in flowers and trees,

A fountain near a garden grot,

And birds of song, and hives of bees.

“And there’s a lady, young and mild,

Who smiles her bees and flowers among;

Before her crawls a white-limb’d child,

Beside her sits a husband young.

“And, yes,—why, you audacious wretch,

She’s something like Miss Laura there—”

Pooh, hold your tongue, I choose to sketch

My little castle—in the air. S. B.