Explore "Clarence Fawcett" by Edgar Lee Masters on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The sudden death of Eugene Carman / Put me in line to be promoted to fifty dollars a month, / And I told my wife and children that night.
But it didn't come, and so I thought / Old Rhodes suspected me of stealing / The blankets I took and sold on the side / For money to pay a doctor's bill for my little girl.
Then like a bolt old Rhodes accused me, / And promised me mercy for my family's sake / If I confessed, and so I confessed, / And begged him to keep it out of the papers, / And I asked the editors, too.
That night at home the constable took me / And every paper, except the Clarion, / Wrote me up as a thief / Because old Rhodes was an advertiser / And wanted to make an example of me.
Oh! well, you know how the children cried, / And how my wife pitied and hated me, / And how I came to lie here.