Frost on the Years

vagabond dopers who would come to ask my father for laudanum, and a witless Irishman who pretended to read the newspaper but could never tell what he had read. This boyhood world has remained with me, much more real than some foreign cities of great charm. It is ironic that the last echo of the great steam locomotives came to me at La Napoule in Southern France, where the express from Nice to Paris halted for a minute or two and then rushed away to the west and then north. I had time in the minute or two to look at the plate on the side of the engine which said "Baldwin," presumably the works in Philadelphia. Some of the engines in Livingston when I was a boy had been built or cared for in Louisville, but where the modern giant coal-train engines had been built I did not know. NOTES* *Boyhood memories are not fully reliable as history and I have consulted the Louisville Courier Journal for reports of the nation wide strike. The years of 1922 and 1923 for the Mount Vernon Signal and the Corbin Times were not available to me. 1TlIe Louisville Courier Journal, August 8, 1922. 2My father was known as the "railroad doctor." He knew Governor Ed Morrow from Somerset, and United States Representative John M. Robsion of the Ninth Congressional District in Kentucky, and his role as a mediator between the Railroad and the townspeople in Livingston may have been strengthened somewhat by his political interests. Frost on the Years The frost is on the year, and so my life, with withered limbs, my cane supports me now. Long gone the years I nestled with my wife: and watching ducks in flocks I know somehow that all about is just a transient thing. But I still hold my land and fertile farm though feeling in my joints the sudden pang of age and all it brings. I can't feel warm but still must wander for my fading sight holds to the ghosts of yesterdays now gone and in my mind's eye, in a glaring light, I still see all the past friends I have known! Familiar place from birth, this farm to me, may I stand still and watch eternally. -Buck Allen 54 ...