Feud.

A Mile of lane, hedged high with iron-weeds     And dying daisies, white with sun, that leads     Downward into a wood; through which a stream     Steals like a shadow; over which is laid     A bridge of logs, worn deep by many a team,     Sunk in the tangled shade.     Far off a wood-dove lifts its lonely cry;     And in the sleepy silver of the sky     A gray hawk wheels scarce larger than a hand.     From point to point the road grows worse and worse,     Until that place is reached where all the land     Seems burdened with some curse.     A ragged fence of pickets, warped and sprung,     On which the fragments of a gate are hung,     Divides a hill, the fox and ground-hog haunt,     A wilderness of briers; o'er whose tops     A battered barn is seen, low-roofed and gaunt,     'Mid fields that know no crops.     Fields over which a path, o'erwhelmed with burs     And ragweeds, noisy with the grasshoppers,     Leads, lost, irresolute as paths the cows     Wear through the woods, unto a woodshed; then,     With wrecks of windows, to a huddled house,     Where men have murdered men.     A house, whose tottering chimney, clay and rock,     Is seamed and crannied; whose lame door and lock     Are bullet-bored; around which, there and here,     Are sinister stains. One dreads to look around.     The place seems thinking of that time of fear     And dares not breathe a sound.     Within is emptiness: the sunlight falls     On faded journals papering its walls;     On advertisement chromos, torn with time,     Around a hearth where wasps and spiders build.     The house is dead; meseems that night of crime     It, too, was shot and killed.