An Old Stun’ Wall
If ye only knew the backaches in an old stun’
wall!
O, Lordy me,
I’m seventy-three!
—Begun amongst these boulders and I’ve lived here through it all.
I wasn’t quite to bub’s age there, when dad commenced to clear
The wust of ninety acres with a hoss team and a steer.
And we’ve used the stun’s for fencin’ and we’ve built around the lot,
O, I’ve tugged and worked there, sonny, ontil gracious me, I’ve sot
And fairly groaned o’ evenings with the twinges in my back;
Sakes, there warn’t no shirkin,’ them days; it was tug and lift and sack,
For it needed lots of muscle, lots of gruntin’, lots of sand
If a feller calculated for to clear a piece of land.
Bub, it isn’t any wonder that our backs has got a hump,
That our arms are stretched and awkward like the handle on a pump,
That our palms are hard and calloused, that we wobble in our gait
—There’s the reason right before you ’round the medders in the State.
And I wonder sometimes, sonny, that we’ve any backs at all
When I figer on the backaches in an Old
Stun’
Wall.
If ye only knew the backaches in an old stun’
wall!
We read of men
Who with a pen
Have pried away the curses that have crushed us in their fall.
I don’t begrudge them honor nor the splendor of their name
For an av’rage Yankee farmer hasn’t any use for fame,
But the man who lifted curses and the man who lifted stones
Never’ll hear a mite of diff’runce in the Heavenly Father’s tones.
For I have the humble notion, bub, that when all kinds of men,
The chaps that pried with crowbar and the chaps that pried with pen,
Are waitin’ to be measured for the things they’ve done below
The angel with the girth-chain’s bound to give us all fair show.
And the humble man who’s tussled with the rocks of stubborn Maine
Won’t find that all his labor has been thankless and in vain.
And while the wise and mighty get the glorious credit due
The man who took the brunt of toil will be remembered too.
The man who bent his aching back will earn his crown, my child,
By the acres he made fertile and the miles of rocks he piled.
That ain’t my whole religion, for I don’t propose to shirk
What my duties are to Heaven,—but the gospel of hard work
Is a mighty solid bed-rock that I’ve built on more or less;
I believe that God Almighty has it in his heart to bless
For the good they’ve left behind them rough old chaps with humped-up backs
Who have gone ahead and smoothed things with the crowbar and the axe.
For if all our hairs are numbered and He notes the sparrow’s fall
He understands the backaches in an
Old
Stun’
Wall.