f them," Alice protested, "and some of them
are so big."

"We can wear up the furs and stocking-caps and mittens," said Peggy,
"and we can put the other things in a basket and carry them up on our
new sled. She'd love to see her namesake."

"I'm not going to take Diana out in such slippery walking," said Alice,
"she might get a fall and break her head."

"As you please," said Peggy; "but I know if I liked a person well enough
to name a child after her, I'd take her up the first minute, slippery or
not."

"You might," said Alice, "but I'm not going to. She is my child, and
she's very breakable."

"Well, anyway, I am going to take Diana a Christmas egg, breakable or
not."

"It isn't your egg; it's mother's," Alice reminded her; for Henrietta
had not begun to lay.

"I'm sure mother will let me have an egg to give to Diana, won't you,
mother?"

"Certainly," said Mrs. Owen; "I should never have had any of my Rhode
Island friends if it had not been for Peggy."

"I think I'll write a verse to go with the egg," said Peggy.

Alice admired the way in which Peggy could write verses. Peggy had only
to take a pencil in hand, and a verse seemed to come out on the paper.
"I think the verses live inside the pencil," Peggy once said. She liked
a blue pencil best. It seemed to have more interesting verses living
inside it than a black one.

"I'd like to see if I can do it," Alice said.

"All right," and Peggy handed the pencil over. "Don't hold it so tight;
hold it loosely, like this."

But the pencil would write nothing for Alice, no matter how she held it.
And Peggy had only held it a few minutes before she wrote a verse. She
sat with her eyes tight shut, for she said she could think better. And
presently Peggy and the pencil wrote a Christmas verse. She liked it so
well she copied it on a sheet of her best Christmas note-paper. At the
head of the sheet was the picture of a window with a lighted candle and
a Christmas wreath; and there were a boy and a girl outside, singing
Christmas carols. This was the verse that Peggy and the pencil wrote.

"I'd like to send a Christmas carol,
To please and cheer my dear Diana:
But here's an egg Angel Hen-Farrell
Has laid in her best Christmas manner."

Mrs. Owen packed the egg carefully with cotton wool in a small box. She
folded the paper with the verse on it and put that on top. She tied the
box up with some Christmas ribbon that had come around one of Peg