Poem for Thursday and Beall-Dawson Exhibits

Waifs and Strays
By Arthur Rimbaud
Translated by Jethro Bithell

Black in the fog and in the snow,
Where the great air-hole windows glow,
With rounded rumps,

Upon their knees five urchins squat,
Looking down where the baker, hot,
The thick dough thumps.

They watch his white arm turn the bread,
Ere through an opening flaming red
The loaf he flings.

They hear the good bread baking, while
The chubby baker with a smile
An old tune sings.

Breathing the warmth into their soul,
They squat around the red air-hole,
As a breast warm.

And when, for feasters' midnight bout,
The ready bread is taken out,
In a cake's form;

And while beneath the blackened beams,
Sings every crust of golden gleams,
While the cricket brags,

The hole breathes warmth into the night,
And into them life and delight,
Under their rags,

And the urchins covered with hoar-frost,
On billows of enchantment tossed
Their little souls,

Glue to the grate their little rosy
Noses, singing through the cosy
Glowing holes,

But with low voices like a prayer,
Bending down to the light down there,
Where heaven gleams.

--So eager that they burst their breeches,
And in the winter wind that screeches
Their linen streams.

--------

I spent most of the day doing chores too tedious to describe -- I didn't even have time to play with my new camera, because I wanted to clear off the shelf where I intend to keep it and doing that made it clear that I needed to clean up other things first. Evening TV involved Arrow, which I liked mostly because John Barrowman was on, Supernatural, which I watched because of the Renfaire preview, and Nashville, which I always like for the music and soap opera complications.

When I posted the cemetery photos yesterday I said I would post more photos from the Beall-Dawson House. The park in which the house is located is also home to the Stonestreet Museum of 19th Century Medicine, a one-room doctor's office was built in 1850 for Dr. Edward Elisha Stonestreet, where he worked for over 50 years, though it was originally located on East Montgomery Avenue. Here are photos from several exhibits at the park:


A Civil War-era dress on display in the Beall-Dawson House, which currently has an exhibit on how the war affected Montgomery County, Maryland.


Diaries kept by a Confederate sympathizer who lived in Maryland during the war...


...and a map of Rockville at the time.


This is the Stonestreet Museum, originally Stonestreet's medical facility built beside his home.


The museum has a collection of his surgical tools...


...and homeopathic remedies, including castor oil for corpulence and cocaine derivatives for cough.


There is also furniture and equipment from the period.


Across the street, signs identify the occupants of the original buildings that surround the Beall-Dawson House.