effort. He worked over
it, propped up in bed, for an hour or two. Then, having looked upon
his work and having seen that it was good, he blushingly passed it
over to me. So I went to the window and read it.

O blue-bird, happy robbin--
Who teached those birds to stick theirselves together?
Who teached them how to put their tails on?
Who teached them how to hold tight on the tree tops?
Who gived them all the fetthers on their brest?
Who gived them all the eggs with little birdies in them?
Who teached them how to make the shells so blue?
Who teached them how to com home in the dark?
Twas God. Twas God. He teached him!

I read it over slowly, with a crazy fluttering of the heart which I
could never explain. They were so trivial, those little halting lines,
and yet so momentous to me! It was life seeking expression, life
groping so mysteriously toward music. It was man emerging out of the
dusk of time. It was Rodin's _Penseur_, not in grim and stately
bronze, but in a soft-eyed and white-bodied child, groping his
stumbling way toward the border-land of consciousness, staring out on
a new world and finding it wonderful. It was my Little Stumbler, my
Precious Piece-of-Life, walking with his arm first linked through the
arm of Mystery. It was my Dinkie looking over the rampart of the
home-nest and breaking lark-like into song.

I went back to the bed and sat down on the edge of it, and took my
man-child in my arms.

"It's wonderful, Dinkie," I said, trying to hide the tears I was so
ashamed of. "It's so wonderful, my boy, that I'm going to keep it with
me, always, as long as I live. And some day, when you are a great
man, and all the world is at your feet, I'm going to bring it to you
and show it to you. For I know now that you are going to be a great
man, and that your old mother is going to live to be so proud of you
it'll make her heart ache with joy!"

He hugged me close, in a little back-wash of rapture, and then settled
down on his pillows.

"I could do better ones than that," he finally said, with a glowing
eye.

"Yes," I agreed. "They'll be better and better. And that'll make your
old Mummsy prouder and prouder!"

He lay silent for several minutes. Then he looked at the square of
paper which I held folded in my hand.

"I'd like to send it to Uncle Peter," he rather startled me by
saying.

_Saturday the Twenty-Ninth_

Once more I