the hill,
And dusk comes quick and cool;
When all at once, in midst of play,
You can't remember what's the way
To multiply--you stop and say,
'Time for school!'"

A clock boomed ten with a familiar sound, and Ann and Amos jumped.

"I almost thought we were an hour late for school," Ann said.

"September's a rather funny month," Amos remarked. "It ends so many things
and it begins so many things."

"I like to come home at the end of summer," little Ann said. Then, without
waiting at all for a clock to strike she swung into a poem:--

"When we travel back in summer to the old house by the sea,
Where long ago my mother lived, a little girl like me,
I have the strangest notion that she still is waiting there,
A small child in a pinafore with ribbon on her hair.
I hear her in the garden when I go to pick a rose;
She follows me along the path on dancing tipsy-toes;
I hear her in the hayloft when the hay is slippery-sweet--
A rustle and a scurry and a sound of scampering feet;
Yet though I sit as still as still, she never comes to me,
The funny little laughing girl my mother used to be.

"Sometimes I nearly catch her as she dodges here and there,
Her white dress flutters round a tree and flashes up a stair;
Sometimes I almost put my hand upon her apron strings--
Then, just before my fingers close, she's gone again like wings.
A sudden laugh, a scrap of song, a footfall on the lawn,
And yet, no matter how I run, forever up and gone!
A fairy or a firefly could hardly flit so fast.
When we come home in summer, I have given up at last.
I lay my cheek on mother's. If there's only one for me,
I'd rather have her, anyway, than the girl she used to be!"

"That's pretty good," said Amos critically. "I like--"

Before he could go on, a little crystal clock struck four. So Amos had to
fall a-rhyming again. He stood on his head and illustrated the last two
lines of the rhyme.

"I like to have vacation,
I like to camp and roam;
But mostly, in a curious way,
I like the coming home.

"Our old house looks so solid,
So settled and arranged;
The front gate creaks the same old creak,
The chimneys haven't changed.

"Those weeks of sea and mountain
Had many valued points;
But oh, this loosening of my bones,
This limbering of my joint