Butler Citizen

AT THE PAWN-SHOP DOOR.

In the winter morning, early when only a few were astir,
And the shutters were up at the windows
and the snow lay white in the streets,
As the wheels of travel and traffic were beginning to whir and whirr.
And the sunshine drove the shadows alike ghosts from their dark retreats
From out the tenement houses, from cellars so cold and damp,
That the humid blossoms of death gleam whitely on wall and floor,
The watchful sentinels stole away from the waking camp,
And, shivering with cold and hunger, appeared at the pawn-shop door.

There was one in her widow's weeds who had striven from day to day
To keep her children in comfort, with plenty of food to eat,
But the rent would be due to-morrow, she'd not the money to pay,
And oh, the disgrace and horror of being turned into the street!
She looked about in her anguish for something that she could spare
From her tenderly hoarded treasure—a scanty yet precious store—
And bearing away the jewel that proudly she used to wear,
In the dusk of a wintry morning she stood at the pawn-shop door.

There were others who gathered around her whose faces too well betrayed
The shrine at which they worshiped, the vice that had bitten in
Through the fibre of all their being, till unblushingly they displayed
The tokens of their enslavement, the taints and traces of sin.
They are regular comers, by the demon of drink accursed,
The lazy and tattered hummers, albeit of breadth and brawn,
Who are driven at early morning by the scourge of a terrible thirst—
Ah! little have they to hope for whose souls are already in pawn!

But there outside of the group, with fingers aching and red,
A little boy with a bundle slips into a vacant place;
There are no shoes on his feet, not much of a cap on his head,
And the great big tears run over the shrunken and careworn face.
He is hungry and cold and wretched; there is no fire on the hearth.
Not a bit of bread in the cupboard, nor even a scrap of meat;
And the little brothers and sisters are strangers to joy and mirth,
When they're pinched by the cold of winter and haven't enough to eat.

Ah! sad enough is the picture and little we dream or know
Of the terrible storms encountered, the anguish and sore distress
Of many we daily meet in our journeying to and fro,
Whom we never have thought to pity, and never have cared to bless,
And driven before the wind of a merciless, cruel fate,
Like vessels shorn of their sails and urged to a rocky shore.
Bereft of their early hopes, and swept from their high estate,
Pitiful wrecks! they stranded close to the pawn-shop door.

—Josephine Pollard, in Harper's Weekly.