bent!
And we'd bear with thy visits gladly, we e'en would be content.

"Then cease thy busy prattle, and cease thy dangerous stings,
Learn, learn to be meek and lamblike like other less-harmful things.
Till we hail with joy thy coming, thy coming on peaceful wings!"

Here the poem ended, and the reader paused for the applause which she
felt to be her due. Peggy had turned aside, and was leaning her head
upon her hand so that Millicent could not see her face. Joan was the
first to speak.

"Millicent, how perfectly lovely! Did you really do it all yourself? You
are the smartest thing I ever knew. That beginning was just too perfect.
Somehow it reminded me of something else."

"Longfellow, probably," said Millicent "'When day is done, and darkness
comes shadowing down the way,' is suggestive of him."

"All except the 'shadowing,'" said Peggy.

"No; I made that word up," returned Millicent, with complacency. "Poets
are obliged to coin words sometimes. What do you think of the poem,
Peggy?"

"Wonderful!" replied her cousin, in a stifled voice. "How did you think
of asking a mosquito to be like a lamb?"

She turned away again, and her shoulders shook convulsively.

"Do read the other!" cried Joan, enthusiastically. "I don't see how you
ever make them rhyme so beautifully."

"Oh, that is easy enough," said Millicent, much pleased. "Whenever I
don't know just what to put I look in my rhyming dictionary for a word."

"Rhyming dictionary?" repeated Peggy, at last uncovering a crimson face.
"Do poets use rhyming dictionaries?"

"Of course. They are obliged to very often, and it saves so much time
and thought, you know. Now this is a sonnet. It is my favorite form of
verse. I suppose you both know that a sonnet must be just fourteen
lines?"

"Oh, I know," agreed Peggy, amiably, "and there are other rules about
it, too."

"Well, that one is the most important, about the fourteen lines. I don't
pay much attention to the other rules. I think rules hamper you when you
are composing."

"Oh!" said Peggy.

"This is Called 'A Sonnet to the Moth Miller,'" continued Millicent:

"Oh, little creature, made so fair, so white,
What seekest thou about my closet door?
To see thee fills no soul with deep delight,
Thy coming almost all men do deplore.
So silent and so fatal is thy task
We haste to catch thee, bring the camphor forth,
To kill thee quite stone-dead is all we ask,
Thou little qui