Page:The poems of Edmund Clarence Stedman, 1908.djvu/57

ALICE OF MONMOUTH The velvet of the strawberry-plot:

Fair and freckled, old and young,

With baskets at their girdles hung,

Searching the plants with no rude haste

Lest berries should hang unpicked, and waste:—

Of the pulpy, odorous, hidden quest,

First gift of the fruity months, and best.

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Crates of the laden baskets cool

Under the trees at the meadow's edge,

Covered with grass and dripping sedge,

And lily-leaves from the shaded pool;

Filled, and ready to be borne

To market before the morrow morn.

Beside them, gazing at the skies,

Hour after hour a young man lies.

From the hillside, under the trees,

He looks across the field, and sees

The waves that ever beyond it climb,

Whitening the rye-slope's early prime;

At times he listens, listlessly,

To the tree-toad singing in the tree,

Or sees the catbird peck his fill

With feathers adroop and roguish bill.

But often, with a pleased unrest,

He lifts his glances to the west,

Watching the kirtles, red and blue,

Which cross the meadow in his view;

And he hears, anon, the busy throng

Sing the Strawberry-Pickers' Song,—

From the far hillside comes again

An echo of the old-time strain.

Sweetly the group their cadence keep;

Swiftly their hands the trailers sweep;

The vines are stripped and the song is sung,

A joyous labor for old and young; 27