“It isn’t your egg; it’s mother’s,” Alice reminded her; for Henrietta had not begun to lay.
“I’m sure mother will let me have an egg to give to Diana, won’t you, mother?”
“Certainly,” said Mrs. Owen; “I should never have had any of my Rhode Island friends if it had not been for Peggy.”
“I think I’ll write a verse to go with the egg,” said Peggy.
Alice admired the way in which Peggy could write verses. Peggy had only to take a pencil in hand, and a verse seemed to come out on the paper. “I think the verses live inside the pencil,” Peggy once said. She liked a blue pencil best. It seemed to have more interesting verses living inside it than a black one.
“I’d like to see if I can do it,” Alice said.
“All right,” and Peggy handed the pencil over. “Don’t hold it so tight; hold it loosely, like this.”
But the pencil would write nothing for Alice, no matter how she held it. And Peggy had only held it a few minutes before she wrote a verse. She sat with her eyes tight shut, for she said she could think better. And presently Peggy and the pencil wrote a Christmas verse. She liked it so well she copied it on a sheet of her best Christmas note-paper. At the head of the sheet was the picture of a window with a lighted candle and a Christmas wreath; and there were a boy and a girl outside, singing Christmas carols. This was the verse that Peggy and the pencil wrote.
“I’d like to send a Christmas carol,
To please and cheer my dear Diana:
But here’s an egg Angel Hen-Farrell
Has laid in her best Christmas manner.”
Mrs. Owen packed the egg carefully with cotton wool in a small box. She folded the paper with the verse on it and put that on top. She tied the box up with some Christmas ribbon that had come around one of Peggy’s presents. The ribbon had holly leaves with red berries on it. She slipped a tiny Santa Claus card under the ribbon. On the card Peggy wrote, “Diana, from a friend who lives in Hotel Hennery.”