Chapter I: Front Matter

POINT LACE AND DIAMONDS BY GEORGE A. BAKER, JR.

POINT LACE AND DIAMONDS

BY GEORGE A. BAKER, JR. AUTHOR OF _"The Bad Habits of Good Society," "West Point," etc._

NEW AND REVISED EDITION WITH NUMEROUS NEW POEMS

NEW YORK FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY MDCCCXCIII

Copyrighted in 1875, by F.B. Patterson.

Copyright, 1886, By White, Stokes, & Allen.

CONTENTS.

PAGE

Retrospection 1 A Rosebud in Lent 4 A Reformer 5 In the Record Room, Surrogate's Office 6 _De Lunatico_ 8 _Pro Patria et Gloria_ 11 After the German 15 An Idyl of the Period 17 Chivalrie 22 A Piece of Advice 24 _Zwei Könige auf Orkadal_ 27 A Song 28 Making New Year's Calls 30 Jack and Me 34 _Les Enfants Perdus_ 37 Chinese Lanterns 40 Thoughts on the Commandments 43 Marriage _à la Mode_. A Trilogy 45 The "Stay-at-Home's" Plaint 58 The "Stay-at-Home's" Pæan 62 Eight Hours 65 Sleeping Beauty 68 Easter Morning 71 A Legend of St. Valentine 75 Frost-Bitten 79 A Song 81 Old Photographs 83 "_Le Dernier Jour d'un Condamné_" 85 Christmas Greens 88 Lake Mahopac--Saturday Night 91 Matinal Musings 95 A Romance of the Sawdust 99 Pyrotechnic Polyglot 105 Fishing 108 _Nocturne_ 111 _Auto-da-Fé_ 113 An Afterthought 117 _Reductio ad Absurdum_ 120 The Mothers of the Sirens 122 _Per Aspera ad Astra_ 124 The Language of Love 126

Transcriber's Note: Possible typos and irregularities in indentation and word usage have been left as found in the original. There are places where punctuation may not have been correctly picked up by the scanning software; please consult another source if you require complete accuracy.

RETROSPECTION.

I'd wandered, for a week or more,
Through hills, and dells, and doleful green'ry,
Lodging at any carnal door,
Sustaining life on pork, and scenery.
A weary scribe, I'd just let slip
My collar, for a short vacation,
And started on a walking trip,
That cheapest form of dissipation--

And vilest, Oh! confess my pen,
That I, prosaic, rather hate your
"Ode to a Sky-lark" sort of men;
I really am not fond of Nature.
Mad longing for a decent meal
And decent clothing overcame me;
There came a blister on my heel--
I gave it up; and who can blame me?

Then wrote my "Pulse of Nature's Heart,"
Which I procured some little cash on,
And quickly packed me to depart
In search of "gilded haunts" of fashion,
Which I might puff at column rates,
To please my host and meet my reckoning;
"Base is the slave who"--hesitates
When wealth, and pleasure both are beckoning.

I sought; I found. Among the swells
I had my share of small successes,
Made languid love to languid belles
And penn'd descriptions of their dresses.
Ah! Millionairess Millicent,
How fair you were! How you adored me!
How many tender hours we spent--
And, oh, beloved, how you bored me!
APRIL, 1871.

Is not that fragmentary bit
Of my young verse a perfect prism,
Where worldly knowledge, pleasant wit,
True humor, kindly cynicism,
Refracted by the frolic glass
Of Fancy, play with change incessant?
JUNE, 1874.

Great Cæsar! What a sweet young ass
I must have been, when adolescent!
AUGUST, 1886.

A ROSEBUD IN LENT.

You saw her last, the ball-room's belle,
A _soufflé_, lace and roses blent;
Your worldly worship moved her then;
She does not know you now, in Lent.

See her at prayer! Her pleading hands
Bear not one gem of all her store.
Her face is saint-like. Be rebuked
By those pure eyes, and gaze no more

Turn, turn away! But carry hence
The lesson she has dumbly taught--
That bright young creature kneeling there
With every feeling, every thought

Absorbed in high and holy dreams
Of--new Spring dresses truth to say,
To them the time is sanctified
From Shrove-tide until Easter day.

A REFORMER.

You call me trifler, fainéant,
And bid me give my life an aim!--
You're most unjust, dear. Hear me out,
And own your hastiness to blame.
I live with but a single thought;
My inmost heart and soul are set
On one sole task--a mighty one--
To simplify our alphabet.

Five vowel sounds we use in speech;
They're A, and E, I, O, and U:
I mean to cut them down to four.
You "wonder what good _that_ will do."
Why, this cold earth will bloom again,
Eden itself be half re-won,
When breaks the dawn of my success
And U and I at last are one.

IN THE RECORD ROOM, SURROGATE'S OFFICE.

A tomb where legal ghouls grow fat;
Where buried papers, fold on fold,
Crumble to dust, that 'thwart the sun
Floats dim, a pallid ghost of gold.
The day is dying. All about,
Dark, threat'ning shadows lurk; but still
I ponder o'er a dead girl's name
Fast fading from a dead man's will.

Katrina Harland, fair and sweet,
Sole heiress of your father's land,
Full many a gallant wooer rode
To snare your heart, to win your hand.
And one, perchance--who loved you best,
Feared men might sneer--"he sought her gold"--
And never spoke, but turned away
Stubborn and proud, to call you cold.

Cold? Would I knew! Perhaps you loved,
And mourned him all a virgin life.
Perhaps forgot his very name
As happy mother, happy wife.
Unanswered, sad, I turn away--
"You loved _her_ first, then?" _First_--well--no--
You little goose, the Harland will
Was proved full sixty years ago.

But Katrine's lands to-day are known
To lawyers as the Glass House tract;
Who were her heirs, no record shows;
The title's bad, in point of fact,
If she left children, at her death,
I've been retained to clear the title;
And all the questions, raised above,
Are, you'll perceive, extremely vital.

DE LUNATICO.

The squadrons of the sun still hold
The western hills, their armor glances,
Their crimson banners wide unfold,
Low-levelled lie their golden lances.
The shadows lurk along the shore,
Where, as our row-boat lightly passes,
The ripples startled by our oar,
Hide murmuring 'neath the hanging grasses.

Your eyes are downcast, for the light
Is lingering on your lids--forgetting
How late it is--for one last sight
Of you the sun delays his setting.
One hand droops idly from the boat,
And round the white and swaying fingers,
Like half-blown lilies gone afloat,
The amorous water, toying, lingers.

I see you smile behind your book,
Your gentle eyes concealing, under
Their drooping lids a laughing look
That's partly fun, and partly wonder
That I, a man of presence grave,
Who fight for bread 'neath Themis' banner
Should all at once begin to rave
In this--I trust--Aldrichian manner.

They say our lake is--sad, but true--
The mill-pond of a Yankee village,
Its swelling shores devoted to
The various forms of kitchen tillage;
That you're no more a maiden fair,
And I no lover, young and glowing;
Just an old, sober, married pair,
Who, after tea, have gone out rowing

Ah, dear, when memories, old and sweet,
Have fooled my reason thus, believe me,
Your eyes can only help the cheat,
Your smile more thoroughly deceive me.
I think it well that men, dear wife,
Are sometimes with such madness smitten,
Else little joy would be in life,
And little poetry be written.

PRO PATRIA ET GLORIA.

The lights blaze high in our brilliant rooms;
Fair are the maidens who throng our halls;
Soft, through the warm and perfumed air,
The languid music swells and falls.
The "Seventh" dances and flirts to-night--
All we are fit for, so they say,
We fops and weaklings, who masquerade
As soldiers, sometimes, in black and gray.

We can manage to make a street parade,
But, in a fight, we'd be sure to run.
Defend you! pshaw, the thought's absurd!
How about April, sixty-one?
What was it made your dull blood thrill?
Why did you cheer, and weep, and pray?
Why did each pulse of your hearts mark time
To the tramp of the boys in black and gray?

You've not forgotten the nation's call
When down in the South the war-cloud burst;
"Troops for the front!" Do you ever think
Who answered, and marched, and got there _first_?
Whose bayonets first scared Maryland?
Whose were the colors that showed the way?
Who set the step for the marching North?
Some holiday soldiers in black and gray.

"Pretty boys in their pretty suits!"
"Too pretty by far to take under fire!"
A pretty boy in a pretty suit
Lay once in Bethel's bloody mire.
The first to fall in the war's first fight--
Raise him tenderly. Wash away
The blood and mire from the pretty suit;
For Winthrop died in the black and gray.

In the shameful days in sixty-three,
When the city fluttered in abject fear,
'Neath the mob's rude grasp, who ever thought--
"God! if the Seventh were only here!"
Our drums were heard--the ruffian crew
Grew tired of riot the self-same day--
By chance of course--you don't suppose
They feared the dandies in black and gray!

So we dance and flirt in our listless style
While the waltzes dream in the drill-room arch,
What would we do if the order came,
Sudden and sharp--"Let the Seventh march!"
Why, we'd faint, of course; our cheeks would pale;
Our knees would tremble, our fears--but stay,
That order I think has come ere this
To those holiday troops in black and gray.

"What would we do!" We'd drown our drums
In a storm of cheers, and the drill-room floor
Would ring with rifles. Why, you fools,
We'd do as we've always done before!
Do our duty! Take what comes
With laugh and jest, be it feast or fray--
But we're dandies--yes, for we'd rather die
Than sully the pride of our black and gray.

AFTER THE GERMAN.
A SOPHOMORE SOLILOQUY.

Blackboard, with ruler and rubber before me,
Chalk loosely held in my hand,
Sun-gilded motes in the air all around me,
Listlessly dreaming I stand.

What do I care for the problem I've written
In characters gracefully slight,
As the festal-robed beauties whose fairy feet flitted
Through the maze of the German last night!

What do I care for the lever of friction,
For sine, or co-ordinate plane,
When fairy musicians are playing the "Mabel,"
And waltzes each nerve in my brain!

On my coat's powdered chalk, not the dust of the diamond
That only last night sparkled there,
By the galop's wild whirl shower'd down on my shoulder
From turbulent tresses of hair.

In my ear is the clatter of chalk against blackboard,
Not music's voluptuous swell;
Alas! this is life,--so pass mortal pleasures,
And,--thank goodness, there goes the bell!

AN IDYL OF THE PERIOD.
IN TWO PARTS.