Thee finds me in the garden, Hannah,--come in! 'Tis kind of thee
To wait until the Friends were gone, who came to comfort me.
The still and quiet company a peace may give indeed,
But blessed is the single heart that comes to us in need.
Come, sit thee down! Here is the bench where Benjamin would sit
On First-day afternoons in spring, and watch the swallows flit:
He loved to smell the sprouting box, and hear the pleasant bees
Go humming round the lilacs and through the apple-trees.
I think he loved the spring: not that he cared for flowers: most men
Think such things foolishness,--but we were first acquainted then,
One spring: the next he spoke his mind: the third I was his wife,
And in the spring (it happened so) our children entered life.
He was but seventy-five! I did not think to lay him yet
In Kennett graveyard, where at Monthly Meeting first we met.
The Father's mercy shows in this: 'tis better I should be
Picked out to bear the heavy cross--alone in age--than he.
We've lived together fifty years.
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