MARY.
245
That Home, the sound we English love so well,
Has been as strange to me as to those nations
That have no word, they tell me, to express it;
And in my heart, perhaps, I fain could find it,
To cast my anchor in a spot like this,
And stay till even one as kind as you are
Might tire at last of the old, useless stranger.
Mary. And what am I myself but old and useless?
I sit beside the fire or in the sunshine,
An old woman, good for nothing but to talk
And please the little children with my stories
Of the old country as they call it here;
And they have heard my tales so oft, that when
I chance to halt they quickly help me onwards;
But since you came to freshen up my memory,
Things half forgotten, thick as bees in summer,
Have swarmed and crowded on my mind so fast,
That I have store to last me out my life;
I think it is your voice that brings around me
The voices that were round me in my youth;
You have not been, you say, in pleasant Yorkshire
For half a lifetime, yet I think your heart
Forgets it not entirely, while your tongue
Remembers it so kindly.
Trav. And so you know me for a Yorkshireman!
And I that have been round the world so oft,
'Mid all my gains and losses, still have kept
A touch that speaks of Home! well then, it seems
The tongue is like the heart, forgetting slowly
What it hath learnt the soonest; like the lessons
Has been as strange to me as to those nations
That have no word, they tell me, to express it;
And in my heart, perhaps, I fain could find it,
To cast my anchor in a spot like this,
And stay till even one as kind as you are
Might tire at last of the old, useless stranger.
Mary. And what am I myself but old and useless?
I sit beside the fire or in the sunshine,
An old woman, good for nothing but to talk
And please the little children with my stories
Of the old country as they call it here;
And they have heard my tales so oft, that when
I chance to halt they quickly help me onwards;
But since you came to freshen up my memory,
Things half forgotten, thick as bees in summer,
Have swarmed and crowded on my mind so fast,
That I have store to last me out my life;
I think it is your voice that brings around me
The voices that were round me in my youth;
You have not been, you say, in pleasant Yorkshire
For half a lifetime, yet I think your heart
Forgets it not entirely, while your tongue
Remembers it so kindly.
Trav. And so you know me for a Yorkshireman!
And I that have been round the world so oft,
'Mid all my gains and losses, still have kept
A touch that speaks of Home! well then, it seems
The tongue is like the heart, forgetting slowly
What it hath learnt the soonest; like the lessons
