“I feel just tingling to try,” she said.  “There’s a kind of dancing in my head, of things that have been there ever so long.  I believe I shall make a poem to-night.  It’s catching, when you’re predisposed; and it’s partly the spring weather, and the sap coming up.  ’Put a name to it,’ Katie!  Almost anything will set me off.”

Kate wrote, on half a dozen scraps; then tossed them up, and pushed them over for Bel to draw.

“How do you like the city in the spring?” was the question; and the word, suggested by Kate’s work at the moment, was,—­“Hem.”

Bel put her elbows on the table, and her hands up against her ears.  Her eyes shone, as they rested intent upon the two penciled bits.  The link between them suggested itself quickly and faintly; she was grasping at an elusive something with all the fine little quivering brain-tentacles that lay hold of spiritual apprehension.

Just at that moment the parlor bell rang.

“I’ll go,” she said.  “You keep to your sewing.  It’s for the nursery, I guess, and I’ll do my poem up there.”

She caught up pencil and paper, and the other fragment also,—­Mrs. Scherman’s own rhyme about the “peaches.”

Mrs. Scherman met her at the parlor door.

“I’m sorry to interrupt you,” she said; “but the baby is stirring.  Could you, or Kate, go up and try to hush her off again?  If I go, she’ll keep me.”

“I will,” said Bel.  “Here is that ‘Crambo’ you were talking of at tea, Mrs. Scherman.  I kept it.  Kate picked it up with the scraps.”

“O, thank you!  Why, Bel, how your face shines!”

Bel hurried off, for Baby Karen “stirred” more emphatically at this moment.  Asenath went back into the parlor.

“Here is that rhyme of mine, Frank, that you were asking for.  Bel found it in the dust-pan.  I believe she’s writing rhymes herself.  She tries out every idea she picks up among us.  She had a pencil in her hand, and her face was brimful of something.  Mr. Stalworth, if I find anything in the dust-pan, I shall turn it over to you.  ‘First and Last’ is bound to act up to its title, and transpose itself freely, according to Scripture.”

“‘First and Last’ will receive, under either head, whatever you will indorse, Mrs. Scherman,—­and the last not least,”—­returned the benign and brilliant editor.

Bel had a knack with a baby.  She knew enough to understand that small human beings have a good many feelings and experiences precisely like those of large ones.  She knew that if she woke up in the night, she should not be likely to fall asleep again if pulled up out of her bed into the cold; nor if she were very much patted and talked to.  So she just took gently hold of the upper edge of the small, fine blanket in which Baby Karen was wrapped, and by it drew her quietly over upon her other side.  The little limbs fell into a new place and sensation of rest, as larger limbs do; little Karen put off waking up and crying for one delicious instant, as anybody would; and in that instant sleep laid hold of her again.  She was safe, now, for another hour or two, at least.