Classic Poem

" Garden of no fruit! Lichen on a stone!
And what is life but a barren laborious tree
Too streaked and scored with black mortality? "
Abbott said several dooms with firm intone,
And had more worlds to sentence, he had not done,
When trot, trot, trot, and squeezing under the wicket
Where one peach hung there came a fellow to pick it;
It was his heathen brother, famished and blown.

Paul had a smile always in waiting. " Brother,
Can you have kept this only peach for me?
If you want half of it though, I will agree. "
But Abbott wanted nothing, he never took pleasure,
And now he glared on Paul and took his measure.
There was a fool in the family, one or the other.