The Lesson of the Water-Mill
quiet and domestic in his tastes, and greatly respected by all his neighbors. His children were my schoolmates.
I did not know of any other venture of his into the field of letters; but this was surely a happy one. The name of our old Dayton neighbor, Coates Kinney, will always be kept alive by his little lyric, “Rain on the Roof,” and General McCallum should be remembered by this tenderly wise little poem, “The Water That Has Passed.”A few days later, a letter from Mr. Gregg D. Wolfe called Dr. Gladden’s attention to the fact that “The Water That Has Passed” was written, not by General McCallum, but by Sarah Doudney, and when this was proved to Dr. Gladden’s satisfaction, he hazarded the guess that a copy of the poem had been found among General McCallum’s papers and mistakenly attributed to him in consequence, since it was incredible that so distinguished and respected a man would ever pose as the author of a poem which was not his.
It is, alas, impossible to place so charitable a construction upon the matter, for there the poem is in the book which General McCallum himself incautiously published. But before going into that, his career may be outlined in a few words.
Daniel Craig McCallum was born at Johnston, Renfrewshire, Scotland, January 21,
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