The Tramps Story from the Festival of Industry (Farm Festivals)

                                                                            by Will Carleton

(an extract)

There was too much land that joined me that I didn't yet possess.
When once he gets land-hungry, strange how ravenous one can be!
'Twasn't long before I wanted all the ground that I could see.
So I bought another eighty (not foreboding any harm),
And for that and some down-money put a mortgage on my farm.
Then I bought another forty, hired some cash to fix up new
And to buy a covered carriage, and of course the mortgage grew.
Now my wife was square against this, 'tis but right that you should know
(Though I'm very far from saying that I think it's always so);
But she went in hearty with me, working hard from day to day,
For we knew that life was business, now we had that debt to pay.

We worked through spring and winter through summer and through fall
But that mortgage worked the hardest and the steadiest of us all;
It worked on nights and Sundays it worked each holiday
It settled down among us, and it never went away.
Whatever we kept from it seemed a'most as bad as theft;
It watched us every minute, and it ruled us right and left.
The rust and blight were with us sometimes, and sometimes not;
The dark-browed, scowling mortgage was forever on the spot.
The weevil and the cut-worm, they went as well as came;
The mortgage staid forever, eating hearty all the same.
It nailed up every window stood guard at every door
And happiness and sunshine made their home with us no more.

Till with failing crops and sickness we got stalled upon the grade,
And there came a dark day on us when the interest wasn't paid;
And there came a sharp foreclosure, and I kind o' lost my hold,
And grew weary and discouraged, and the farm was cheaply sold.
The children left and scattered when they hardly yet were grown;
My wife she pined an' perished, an' I found myself alone.
What she died of was "a mystery," an' the doctors never knew;
But I  knew she died of mortgage just as well 's I wanted to.
If to trace a hidden sorrow were within the doctors' art,
They'd ha' found a mortgage lying on that woman's broken heart.