Ladies.

Southern Cross, Volume 1, Issue 49, 3 March 1894, Page 4

Ladies.

A PRARIE GIRL’S THRONE

Where the road winds away o’er the sandhills (Which seem quite nothing the least More than the grim ghosts of the grand hills You left in the green-girdled East),- ( The sod house stands, weakly and humbly, Invoking the pity of all: The doorstep is shaky and tumbly, The chimney is ready to fall. The fence of barb wire built around it For montns on its staples has swayed - The homesteaders’ children have found it A famous slack-wire promenade ; And the sods of the little school building Are crumbling where blizzards have been, And the sun through one small hole is gilding A streak of the earth floor within.

The teacher is sweetly informal, i Her face is the face of the good : She knows not a thing of “ the Normal,” But all that a prairie girl should. Ah, yes, I imagine the ladies Who teach the young folk in the town Would deem life out here as a Hades, Nor see in that nail keg a throne. , But she, the bravo gild of the prairies And sandhills, imagines that this Grim life, that ne’er changes or varies, ' Is pleasure that runs ne’er amiss ; For the homesteaders’ children may try her, And dullness and stubborness pall, But forty-six young men swear by her, And one —but you wait till next fall. Cabl Smith, in the Ladies’ Home Jouenax,