Page:Middle Aged Love Stories (IA middleagedlove00bacorich).djvu/160

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the old china rose-jar that stood on the polished mahogany table inside. The first few notes of the piano carried with them to him who knew the room so well a never-fading picture of the peaceful, old-time parlor: the willow plates in the mother-o'-pearl cabinet, the "Sistine Madonna" and Correggio's "Holy Night," the dim oil-paintings that great-grandmother Endicott had made so long ago, the bronze Chinese idol that squatted near the rose-jar, the dusky, elusive pier-glass with its dull gilding of another generation and its mysterious, haunting reflections—they were all confused with the tune that Miss Sabina's sweet, reedy voice had so often quavered through; a tune that she would not have known by its title of "Fair Harvard":


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Believe me, if all those endearing young charms,
That I gaze on so fondly to-day,
Were to change by to-morrow and to fleet in my arms,
Like fairy gifts fading away,