She hardly dared call them poetry, and yet they were dear to her, because they were the outpourings of her lonely little heart.
All the children knew that she "made up rhymes," but only Davy had any knowledge of the old ledger.

He could not understand all the verses she read to him about the wild flowers, and life and death and time, but they jingled pleasantly in his ears, and he made an attentive listener.
"I'll take it," she decided at last, slipping some loose pages in between the covers.

"I may want to write something at Locust." She paused long at the foot of her bed, trying to make up her mind about her godmother's picture, that hung there in a little frame of pine cones.
"I don't know whether to take it or not," she said to Davy, looking up lovingly at the Madonna of her dreams, whose sweet face had been her last greeting at night, and first welcome on waking, for several years.
"I hate to leave it behind, but I'll have my real godmother to look at while I'm gone, and it'll seem so nice to have this picture here to smile at me when I get back, as if she was glad I'd come home.

I believe I'll leave it." It was a solemn moment when Betty climbed into the wagon after her trunk had been lifted in at the back, and perched herself on the high spring seat, beside Davy and his father.

The other children were drawn up in a line along the porch, to watch her go.