d kinks from the side of my head. Incidentally, I was horrified
to notice how thin I was--thin, even for a dying Antony--and my frock
was so outgrown that it hardly covered my knees. "Ridiculous!" I said
under my breath, as I confronted this miserable figure--so shamefully
insignificant for the vicarious emotions which it had been housing.
"Ridiculous!"

I hated Miss Goss, and must have shown it in my stony stare, for she put
her arm around me and said it was a pity I had been to all the trouble
to learn a poem which was--well, a trifle too--too old--but that she
hoped to find something equally "pretty" for me to speak. At the use of
that adjective in connection with William Lytle's lines, I wrenched away
from her grasp and stood in what I was pleased to think a haughty calm,
awaiting her directions.

She took from the shelves a little volume of Whittier, bound in calf,
handling it as tenderly as if it were a priceless possession. Some
pressed violets dropped out as she opened it, and she replaced them
with devotional fingers. After some time she decided upon a lyric lament
entitled "Eva." I was asked to run over the verses, and found them
remarkably easy to learn; fatally impossible to forget. I presently
arose and with an impish betrayal of the poverty of rhyme and the
plethora of sentiment, repeated the thing relentlessly.

O for faith like thine, sweet Eva,
Lighting all the solemn reevah [river],
And the blessings of the poor,
Wafting to the heavenly shoor [shore].

"I do think," said Miss Goss gently, "that if you tried, my child, you
might manage the rhymes just a little better."

"But if you're born in Michigan," I protested, "how can you possibly
make 'Eva' rhyme with 'never' and 'believer'?"

"Perhaps it is a little hard," Miss Goss agreed, and still clinging to
her Whittier, she exhumed "The Pumpkin," which she thought precisely
fitted for our Harvest Home festival. This was quite another thing from
"Eva," and I saw that only hours of study would fix it in my mind. I
went to my home, therefore, with "The Pumpkin" delicately transcribed
in Miss Goss's running hand, and I tried to get some comfort from the
foreign allusions glittering through Whittier's kindly verse. As the
days went by I came to have a certain fondness for those homely lines:

O--fruit loved of boyhood!--the old days recalling,
When wood grapes were purpling and brown nuts were falling!
When wild, ugl