Sallie F. Toler
Mrs. Sallie F. Toler, Wichita, has written on every subject from pigs and pole cats to patriotism. She is the author of several plays and three vaudeville sketches. A comedy, a racing romance, “Handicapped;” “Thekla,” a play in three acts; “On Bird’s Island,” a four-act play; and “Waking Him Up,” a farce, are played in stock now.
Mrs. Toler contributes to many papers and lectures on “The Short Story” and “The Modern Drama.”
MARGARET PERKINS.
As a 1914 Christmas offering, Margaret Perkins, a Hutchinson High School teacher, gave us her volume of beautiful poems. “The Love Letters of a Norman Princess” is the love story, in verse, of Hersilie, a ward and relative of William, The Conqueror, and Eric, a kinsman of the unfortunate King Harold.
“I thought once, in a dream, that Love came near
With silken flutter of empurpled wings
That wafted faint, strange fragrance from the things
Abloom where age and season never sear.
The joy of mating birds was in my ear,
And flamed my path with dancing daffodils
Whose splendor melted into greening hills
Upseeking, like my spirit, to revere.”
“Before you came, this heart of mine
A fairy garden seemed
With lavender and eglantine;
And lovely lilies gleamed
Above the purple-pansy sod
Where ruthless passion never trod.”
“If Heaven had been pleased to let you be
A keeper of the sheep, a peasant me,
Within a shepherd’s cottage thatched with vine
Now might we know the bliss of days divine.”
—“We are part of Heaven’s scheme,
You and I:
Child of sunshine and the dew
I was earthly—born as you.
“Yet my little hour I go,
Troubled maid,
Even where the storm blasts blow,
Unafraid;
Confident that from the sod
All things upward wend to God.”
“Dear heart, the homing hour is here,
The task is done.
Toilers, and they who course the deer
Turn, one by one,
At day’s demise,
Where dwells a deathless glow
In loving eyes.
I hear them hearthward go
To castle, or to cottage on the lea;
But him I love comes never home to me.”
The peaks that rift the saffron sheen
Of sunset skies
In purple loveliness, when seen
By nearer eyes,
Are bleakly bare.
To brave those boulders gray
No climbers dare.
O, in some future may
This mountain mass of unfulfilled desires
Be unto me as yonder haloed spires!”
Miss Perkins is the compiler of “Echoes of Pawnee Rock,” and writes short stories and poems for the magazines. Some of her verse is published in Woolard’s “Father.”