e was twelve she wrote
a birthday poem to herself, and she made natal' rhyme with Milton,.'
which, of course, it wouldn't. I remember every verse ended:

'This is my day so natal
And I will follow Milton.'

Another one of hers was written just because she couldn't help it, she
said. This was it:

'Let me to the hills away,
Give me pen and paper;
I'll write until the earth will sway
The story of my Maker.'"

The minister could scarcely refrain from smiling, but he controlled
himself that he might lose none of Rebecca's quaint observations.
When she was perfectly at ease, unwatched and uncriticised, she was a
marvelous companion.

"The name of the poem is going to be My Star,'" she continued, "and Mrs.
Baxter gave me all the ideas, but somehow there's a kind of magicness
when they get into poetry, don't you think so?" (Rebecca always talked
to grown people as if she were their age, or, a more subtle and truer
distinction, as if they were hers.)

"It has often been so remarked, in different words," agreed the
minister.

"Mrs. Baxter said that each star was a state, and if each state did its
best we should have a splendid country. Then once she said that we ought
to be glad the war is over and the States are all at peace together; and
I thought Columbia must be glad, too, for Miss Dearborn says she's
the mother of all the States. So I'm going to have it end like this: I
didn't write it, I just sewed it while I was working on my star:

For it's your star, my star, all the stars together,
That make our country's flag so proud
To float in the bright fall weather.
Northern stars, Southern stars, stars of the East and West,
Side by side they lie at peace
On the dear flag's mother-breast."

"'Oh! many are the poets that are sown by nature,'" thought the
minister, quoting Wordsworth to himself. "And I wonder what becomes of
them! That's a pretty idea, little Rebecca, and I don't know whether
you or my wife ought to have the more praise. What made you think of the
stars lying on the flag's mother-breast'? Where did you get that word?"

"Why" (and the young poet looked rather puzzled), "that's the way it is;
the flag is the whole country--the mother--and the stars are the states.
The stars had to lie somewhere: 'LAP' nor 'ARMS' wouldn't sound well
with West,' so, of course, I said 'BREAST,'" Rebecca answered, with some
surprise at the question; and the minis