"I'll tell you just what she is, sir," vouchsafed Tilly, confidentially. "She is a rhyming dictionary, Mr. Hartley, just as I said in the first place; and I'd be willing to guarantee any time that she'd find a rhyme for any word in this or any other language within two seconds after the gun is fired. If you don't believe it, you should hear her 'unearth 'em' on the 'nasturtium.'"
"Tilly, Tilly!" choked Genevieve, convulsively.
"Oh, but she said she couldn't find one for petunia," broke in the exact Cordelia.
"You don't mean she actually writes—poetry!" ejaculated Mrs. Kennedy.
"Writes it!—my dear lady!" (Tilly had assumed her most superior air.) "If that were all! But she talks it, day in and day out. Everything is a poem, from a letter to a scraggly nasturtium. She carries an unfailing supply of her own verses in her head, and of other people's in her pocket. If you ask for the butter at the table, you're never sure she won't strike an attitude, and chant:
"'Butter, Butter, Oh, good-by!
Better butter ne'er did—er—fly.'"
"I think I should like to see this young person," observed Mrs. Kennedy, when the laughter at Tilly's sally had subsided.
"Maybe you will sometime. She wants to go East," rejoined Tilly.
"She does? What for?"
"Principally to see Paul Revere's grave, I believe; incidentally to go to school."