Suppose you stood just five feet two,

So I made gardens and raked the lawnsAnd bought John Alden’s books with my earningsAnd toiled for the very means of life.I wanted to marry Delia Prickett,But how could I do it with what I earned?And there was Aunt Persis more than seventy,Who sat in a wheel-chair half alive,With her throat so paralyzed, when she…

I had no words for it, exceptThat I was frightened and told my Mother;And that my Father got a pistolAnd would have killed Charlie, who was a big boy,Fifteen years old, except for his Mother.Nevertheless the story clung to me.But the man who married me, a widower of thirty-five,Was a newcomer and never heard itTill…

It was midnight and not a soul abroad.Out of the chimney of the court-houseA gray-hound of smoke leapt and chasedThe northwest wind.I carried a ladder to the landing of the stairsAnd leaned it against the frame of the trap-doorIn the ceiling of the portico,And I crawled under the roof and amid the raftersAnd flung among…

With scarce five acres of ground around it;And I had so many children to feedAnd school and clothe, and a wife who was sickFrom bearing children.One day lawyer Whitney came alongAnd proved to me that Christian Dallman,Who owned three thousand acres of land,Had bought the eighty that adjoined meIn eighteen hundred and seventy-oneFor eleven dollars,…

In Peoria first, and later in Chicago,Denver, Frisco, New York, wherever I lived,How I happened to lead the life,And what was the start of it.Well, I told them a silk dress,And a promise of marriage from a rich man —(It was Lucius Atherton).But that was not really it at all.Suppose a boy steals an appleFrom…

For as a boy I made balloonsAnd wondrous kites and toys with clocksAnd little engines with tracks to run onAnd telephones of cans and thread.I played the cornet and painted pictures,Modeled in clay and took the partOf the villain in the ‘Octoroon.’But then at twenty-one I marriedAnd had to live, and so, to liveI learned…