Page:The poems of Edmund Clarence Stedman, 1908.djvu/334

POEMS OF NATURE Lending a helping hand to cottagers

Along the lowlands. Now, at early morn,

The banks were sentry-lined with thrifty swains,

Who hauled great stores of drift-wood up the slope.

But toward the bridge our village maidens soon

Came flocking, thick as swallows after storms,

When, with light wing, they skim the happy fields

And greet the sunshine. Danger mostly gone,

They watched the thunderous passage of the flood

Between the abutments, while the upper stream,

Far as they saw, lay like a seething strait,

From hill to hill. Below, with gradual fall

Through narrower channels, all was clash and clang

And inarticulate tumult. Through the grove

Yonder, our picnic-ground, the driving tide

Struck a new channel, and the craggy ice

Scored down its saplings. Following with the rest

Came George and Lucy, not three honeymoons

Made man and wife, and happier than a pair

Of cooing ring-doves in the early June.

Two piers, you know, bore up the former bridge,

Cleaving the current, wedge-like, on the north;

Between them stood our couple, intergrouped

With many others. On a sudden loomed

An immolating terror from above,—

A floating field of ice, where fifty cakes

Had clung together, mingled with a mass

Of débris from the upper conflict, logs

Woven in with planks and fence-rails; and in front

One huge, old, fallen trunk rose like a wall

Across the channel. Then arose a cry

From all who saw it, clamoring, Flee the bridge!

Run shoreward for your lives! and all made haste,

Eastward and westward, till they felt the ground

Stand firm beneath them; but, with close-locked arms,

Lucy and George still looked, from the lower rail, 304