I told her no, although I knew a little about him myself, even if he wasn't in that easy Shakespeare that Lamb wrote for kids. And she seemed to be lost in thought, so I got lost too. It never is hard for me to. I thought: "Mercy, how I have grown!" When I first commenced keeping this diary I just despised poetry, and never cared about keeping my hair tied out of my eyes, nor my hands clean. You know that age! But I soon got over that, for when you get a little bigger being in love causes you to admire poetry and also to beautify yourself. Jean and I tried very sour buttermilk (the sourer the better) to make our complexion lovely, with tansy mixed in, until it got so sour that mother said, "Whew! There must be a rat dead in the walls!" So we had to pour it out. In looking over my past life it seems to me that I've been in love with somebody or other ever since that night so long ago, when Mammy Lou washed me and dressed me up in my tiny hemstitched clothes. And with such lovely heroes, too! When I was awfully little I used to be crazy about the prince that the mermaid rescued while Hans Christian Andersen stood on the beach and watched them. Then I loved Ben Hur from his pictures when I was ten, John Halifax when I was eleven, Lord Byron when I was twelve--I loved him then, do now, and ever shall, world without end, Amen! It is so much easier to love _good-looking_ people than good ones! And, oh, every handsome young Moor, who ever dwelt in "the moonlit halls of the Alhambra!" Washington Irving will have a heap to answer for in the making of me. And I used to dream about "Bonny Prince Charlie," although Miss Wilburn never _could_ hammer it into my head which one of the Stuarts he was. And _actors_! Well, I would try to make a list and write it on the fly-pages, only it might be a bad example to my grandchildren; then, too, there are so very few fly-pages. But I started out to tell how much I've changed since I began this book, for now I not only adore poetry, I write it! Fully a quart jar full I've written since I found the first buttercup this spring. An ode to Venus, an ode to Venice, and a world of just plain odes. Mammy Lou washed out a preserves jar and put it on my desk for me to stick them in. It saves trouble for her. Jean soon woke up out of her brown study and commenced telling about Cassius.