“Now let’s read them,” proposed Molly, who loved to laugh even at herself.

The boys politely declined, and scrambled their notes into the chosen baskets in great haste; but the girls were less bashful.  Jill was invited to begin, and gave her little piece, with the pink hyacinth basket before her, to illustrate her poem.

  “TO MY LADY

  “There are no flowers in the fields,
  No green leaves on the tree,
  No columbines, no violets,
  No sweet anemone. 
  So I have gathered from my pots
  All that I have to fill
  The basket that I hang to-night,
  With heaps of love from Jill.”

“That’s perfectly sweet!  Mine isn’t; but I meant it to be funny,” said
Molly, as if there could be any doubt about the following ditty:—­

  “Dear Grif,
  Here is a whiff
  Of beautiful spring flowers;
  The big red rose
  Is for your nose,
  As toward the sky it towers.

  “Oh, do not frown
  Upon this crown
  Of green pinks and blue geranium
  But think of me
  When this you see,
  And put it on your cranium.”

“O Molly, you will never hear the last of that if Grif gets it,” said Jill, as the applause subsided, for the boys pronounced it “tip-top.”

“Don’t care, he gets the worst of it any way, for there is a pin in that rose, and if he goes to smell the mayflowers underneath he will find a thorn to pay for the tack he put in my rubber boot.  I know he will play me some joke to-night, and I mean to be first if I can,” answered Molly, settling the artificial wreath round the orange-colored canoe which held her effusion.

“Now, Merry, read yours:  you always have sweet poems;” and Jill folded her hands to listen with pleasure to something sentimental.

“I can’t read the poems in some of mine, because they are for you; but this little verse you can hear, if you like:  I’m going to give that basket to Ralph.  He said he should hang one for his grandmother, and I thought that was so nice of him, I’d love to surprise him with one all to himself.  He’s always so good to us;” and Merry looked so innocently earnest that no one smiled at her kind thought or the unconscious paraphrase she had made of a famous stanza in her own “little verse.”

  “To one who teaches me
  The sweetness and the beauty
  Of doing faithfully
  And cheerfully my duty.”

“He will like that, and know who sent it, for none of us have pretty pink paper but you, or write such an elegant hand,” said Molly, admiring the delicate white basket shaped like a lily, with the flowers inside and the note hidden among them, all daintily tied up with the palest blush-colored ribbon.

“Well, that’s no harm.  He likes pretty things as much as I do, and I made my basket like a flower because I gave him one of my callas, he admired the shape so much;” and Merry smiled as she remembered how pleased Ralph looked as he went away carrying the lovely thing.