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Show NOTHING TO DO. She said she had nothing to do. But her mother sat in an invalid chair In the city's stuffy, stifling air-Sat air-Sat and longed In her loneliness For a smile of love or a tender caress Oh. a famine of love, It has been said.i Is worse far worse than a famine of bread. And the daughter she'd nursed thro' her infant days, And patiently borne with her wilful ways. And petted and spoiled, till she grew to be ' As stunted and useless as a withered tree; The daughter, lost from her sight and side. In the rush and the whirl of life's full tide Her daughter had nothing to do-Nothing do-Nothing to do. She said she had nothing to give, But stored in her closet were pictures and toys Enough to gladden a hundred boys, Molding to fading for lack of us?, That was working more havoc thnn daily abuse. While over the way a cripple lay-Flat lay-Flat on his back the livelong day. And yearned for a toy, ,a picture, a book, v v At which in his helpless pain he might look Something with which he might while The long, slow hours of the wearying day And yet she had nothing to give. Perhaps she thought she had nothing to give, Perhaps she thought it was useless to live. She had eyes, but she never saw i:fe' need; She had ears, but she heard not the suffering plead. Oh! a thousand things she might have done Might have given to come poor, needy one; Had she opened her eye, ha3 t-he turned her car To the sights and the "sounds that pressed so near! Look at the world as it lies around. At the teeming air, At the fruitful ground. That's not one thing, to its mission true, With nothing to give and nothing to do. The flowers must bloom, the grass must grow. The birds must sing, the wind must blow, In God's own world all things that live Have something to do and something to give. F. H. Marr, in Baltimore Sun. |