All the children knew that she "made up rhymes," but only Davy had any
knowledge of the old ledger. He could not understand all the verses she
read to him about the wild flowers, and life and death and time, but
they jingled pleasantly in his ears, and he made an attentive listener.

"I'll take it," she decided at last, slipping some loose pages in
between the covers. "I may want to write something at Locust."

She paused long at the foot of her bed, trying to make up her mind about
her godmother's picture, that hung there in a little frame of pine
cones.

"I don't know whether to take it or not," she said to Davy, looking up
lovingly at the Madonna of her dreams, whose sweet face had been her
last greeting at night, and first welcome on waking, for several years.
"I hate to leave it behind, but I'll have my real godmother to look at
while I'm gone, and it'll seem so nice to have this picture here to
smile at me when I get back, as if she was glad I'd come home. I believe
I'll leave it."

It was a solemn moment when Betty climbed into the wagon after her trunk
had been lifted in at the back, and perched herself on the high spring
seat, beside Davy and his father. The other children were drawn up in a
line along the porch, to watch her go. She wore one of her every-day
dresses of dark blue gingham, and her white sunbonnet, but the familiar
little figure had taken on a new interest to them. They regarded her as
some sort of a venturesome Columbus, about to launch on a wild voyage of
discovery. None of them had ever been beyond Jaynes's Post-office in
their journeyings, and the youngest had not seen even that much of the
outside world.