Sometimes seriously, as in two lines which have always brought the tears to my eyes--I do not know why. I think I must have put them together myself when I was thinking in sermon-time (which is a very good time to think in). Because the first is the line of a Scottish psalm, and the rest is--I know not what--some jingle that ran in my head, I suppose. But they made me cry--they do still, I confess, and it is the color-word that does it!--that, and the feeling that it is years and years ago since first I began to say them over to myself. It seems as if there would never again be such hues on the mountains, never such richness on the heather, never sunsets so arrogant (yes, I got the word that time) as those when I was little. But what, you ask, are the lines? Well, you won't think anything of them. I _know_ you will laugh. They are just--but oh! I am ashamed to put them down to be printed. For they are just altogether mine--all little girls who have been lonely little girls will know what I mean. Boys are pigs and will laugh--except Hugh John. However, I can't put off any longer, can I? Oh, yes, I could, but--it is better to be over and done with it. MY POEM. Made up when I was (about) Four. "I to the hills will lift mine eyes-- The purple hills of Paradise." That's all! Now laugh! And if you do, I shan't ever love you again. Father smiles and says that very likely I did put them together, but that the last line is in a book of poems by a man named Trowbridge. Well, what if it is? Can't _I_ think it and Mr. Trowbridge too? I never saw his old book. Why, I could not read then, and _he_ couldn't know what a little girl was thinking, sitting down by Esk-waterside and watching the purple hills--till I was told to come in and haste-me-fast, because the dew was falling. But of course I don't tell this to everybody. They would call it sentiment. But I pity the little lonely girl who doesn't have "thinks" like that all to herself, which she would die sooner than tell to anybody except to her Dear Diary. After the boys got bigger and could romp, I didn't have nearly so many thinks--not time enough, I suppose. Boys need a heap of watching. At first they have no soul--only a mouth to be silly with, teeth to eat with, and a Little Imp inside each to make them pesterful and like boys. Well, little by little, I made a collection of things that were of my color--all in my head, of course. "League upon rolling league of imperial purple!" I think it was father who wrote that, and I believe his heart was pretty big and proud within him, seeing his own heathery country spread out before him when he did it. I wonder if something went _cluck-cluck_ (like a hen) at the bottom of his throat? It does in mine sometimes. Then there is "the Purple Wine of the Balkans," and "the wine-hearted sea"--but that last I only heard of at school.