She sat and stared from the window ledge,
She sat and stared at the sea,
Was sitting all through my childhood there
Since Eighteen fifty-three,
They said that she’d only stand upright
When a sail came into the bay,
When a ship came back from the Indies, or
Returned from Mandalay.

Nobody knew what she did in there,
She knitted, or she sewed,
Perhaps she was sat embroidering
As she watched the old sailroad,
They say she looked for a purple sail
Run up at the mizzen mast,
A sign that a certain Captain Hale
Had sailed on home at last.

She had a gentle and kindly face
I remembered from my youth,
But time went on and her face had shone
With tears, to tell the truth,
Her beauty gradually faded as
The years, they took their toll,
And sadness leached from her pale blue eyes
Before the house was sold.

A ship sailed into the harbour on
A warm spring afternoon,
A tattered sail at the mizzen that
Had lost its purple bloom,
The Captain wandered along the shore
From out where the sea was calm,
And stopped to gaze at a window,
But with a brunette on his arm.

He shook his head for a moment
As at a distant memory,
One of a thousand left behind
In the years that he’d spent at sea,
His eyes were held for a moment by
The eyes at the window pane,
But then he turned to the young brunette,
And went on his way again.

I bought the house when the sign went up
Though the agent said, ‘You’re sick!
I wouldn’t be touching that tumbledown,
It’s just a pile of brick.
Nobody’s been in there for years,
The thing needs pulling down,
You’ll get the place for a song, of course,
But there’s better in the town.’

I went and I picked the key up and
I stood out on the grass,
And stared on up at the window that
Was crazed, with broken glass,
The house was dark as a midden, all
Was shrouded in a gloom,
I felt my way up the passageway
And ventured in that room.

She sat quite still with her back to me
And stared out as before,
The window, it was crazed and cracked
And that was the most she saw,
I walked up slowly behind her, though
I didn’t know what to say,
She looked as if she’d been porcelain,
But now she was only clay.

I had the glazier fix the pane
And I locked that room up tight,
I wouldn’t let anyone go in there,
It didn’t seem to be right.
I put on a Captain’s hat, and stand
Between the house and the sea,
And swear that I see a gentle smile,
But now, she’s looking at me!

David Lewis Paget