Poetry.

Southern Cross, Volume 2, Issue 21, 18 August 1894, Page 5

Poetry.

THE MORTGAGE. Now that we are about to have cheap money for farmers, it may be taken for granted that the doleful state of things described in the following lines by W. M. Carleton the American poet, will be unknown in fair New Zealand : We worked through Spring and Winter, through Summer and through Tall, But the mortgage worked the hardest and steadiest of them all; It worked on nights and Sundays, it worked each holiday ; It settled down among us and it never went away. Whatever we kept from it seemed almost as theft; It watched us every minute and it ruled us right and left. The rust and blight were with us sometimes and sometimes not, The dark browed, scowling mortgage was for ever on the spot. The weavil and the cut-worm, they went as well as came ; The mortgage stayed for ever, eating hearty all the same. It nailed up every window, stood guard at every door ; And happiness and sunshine made their home with us no more. Till with failing crops and sickness we got stalled upon the grade. And there came a dark day on us when the interest wasn’t paid ; And there came a sharp foreclosure and I kind o’ lost my hold, And grew weary and discouraged, aud the farm was cheaply sold. The children left and scattered, when they hardly yet were grown ; My wife she pined and perished, an’ I found myself alone. What she died of was ‘ a mystery,’ the doctors never knew; But I knew she died of mortgage just as well as I wanted to. If to trace a hidden sorrow were within the doctor’s art, They’d ha’ found a mortgage lying on that woman’s broken heart. Worm or beetle, drought or tempest, on a farmer’s landrmay fall, But for first-class ruination, trust a mortgage ’gainst them all.