The Lesson of the Water-Mill
tried to do was to elaborate and polish it up, to make it more flowing; but a comparison of his first stanza, as given above, with Miss Doudney’s version will show that his changes were all for the worse. His punctuation, moreover, is that of a man who, if not exactly illiterate, was at least quite unskilled in writing. His “Reaper’s sing” is a mistake which no one with any knowledge of grammar would make.
But he gave himself away still further, for he not only revised Miss Doudney’s stanzas, but added one of his own, after his usual moralizing way. Here it is—it speaks for itself:
Oh! love thy God and fellow man, thyself consider last,
For come it will when thou must scan, dark errors of the past,
Soon will this fight of life be o’er, and earth recede from view,
And Heaven in all its glory shine, where all is pure and true,
Ah! then thou’lt see more clearly still, the proverb deep and vast,
“The mill will never grind with water that is past.”
More than once, in the course of these papers, it has been shown what deadly peril the plagiarist runs when he attempts to add a stanza to the poem he has stolen. In General McCallum’s case it is, as usual, fatal! Nobody
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