Come sell your pony, cowboy—
Sell your pony to me;
Braided bridle and your puncher saddle,
And spend your money free.
“If I should sell my pony,
And ride the range no more,
Nail up my hat and my silver spurs
Above my shanty door;
“And let my door stand open wide
To the snow and the rain and sun;
And bury me under the green sweetgrass
Where you hear the river run.”
As I came down the sweetgrass range
And by the cabin door,
I heard a singing in the early dusk
Along the river shore;
I heard a singing to the early stars,
And the tune of a pony’s feet.
The joy of the riding singer
I never shall forget.
_T. A. Daly_
Thomas Augustine Daly was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, May
28, 1871. He attended Villanova College and Fordham University
(1889), leaving there at the end of his sophomore year to become a
newspaper man. Since 1891 he has been on the staff of various
Philadelphia journals, writing reviews, editorials, travel-notes
and, most of all, running the columns in which his much-quoted verse
originally appeared.
_Canzoni_ (1906) and _Carmina_ (1909) contain the best known of
Daly’s varied dialect verse. Although he has written in half a dozen
different idioms including “straight” English (_vide Songs of
Wedlock_, 1916), his half-humorous, half-pathetic interpretations of
the Irish and Italian immigrants are his _forte_.
Seldom descending to caricature, Daly exhibits the features and
foibles of his characters without exploiting them; even the lightest
passages in _McAroni Ballads_ (1919) are done with delicacy and a
not too sentimental appreciation.