Page:This Canada of ours and other poems.djvu/41

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THE WHITE STONE CANOE.
35

Every whisper of the breezes,
Stirred the blood of young Abeka,
When he wandered with his Wabose,
Through the shadows of that forest,
In the fulness of the summer,
Breathing words of love and gladness.

    O the dreary days of autumn,
When he watched her sinking, dying,
Flushed with fever like the maple,
Shaken like the leaves of aspen.
Ere the early snows of winter
Spread their mantle o'er the forest,
She had passed to the Hereafter.
Kindly hands of women bore her
To her distant place of burial,
Where the tall and stately pine trees
Tower above the birch and basswood.

    There Abeka often lingered,
Catching echoes from the branches