POETRY.

Globe, Volume XXII, Issue 1910, 8 April 1880, Page 3

POETRY.

DARNING THE STOCKINGS. Darning tho stockings, some white, tome red, Grandmother sits in her high-backed chair. Tall and erect though she’s seventy-five, And silver-gray is her once dark hair. Darning the stockings, this scarlet pair Is little Minnie’s, the household pet, And a far-off look comes in grandmas’s eyes, For often the present she seems to forget. And somehow I fancy she’s thinking now Of the first little Minnie, her youngest, too, With the golden hair that our darling has, And eyes of the violet’s tender blue. She’d have been a woman now had she lived, But in grandma’s thoughts she’s always young, With the same sweet face that they laid away, Where the frail Spring blossoms are first to come. Darning the stockings, ’tis Fred’s, of course, That come miamated, some blue, some grey, With some of them long, and some of them short, And none of them matching, ’tis just his way. And grandma Emiles as she turns them o’er, For Fred, “ we always call grandma’s boy,” Coming to her with his boyish sports, His cuts and bruises, or broken toy. Just such a boy as his father was, Brimming with mischief, yet kind at heart; And so you see when his father scolds ’Tis always grandma who takes his part. Still one pair is unmended left. But the shining needle is laid away. For the tired feet that once wore them rest Where the daisies have bloomed for many a day. But grandma keeps them to her, it seems, As if he were only gone for awhile; At least, I shall meet him soon she thinks, And folds them softly away with a smile. So what to our careless eyes may seem Only a basket of mended hose, To grandma’s fancy its wicker sides Full many a vision and dream expose. So sitting erect in high-backed chair, With thoughts of many a vanished day, She lives the past over again As the stackings are mended and laid away