"'DON'T YOU THINK WE HAVE ENOUGH FLOWERS, ROSY?'"
"I do indeed!" answered Rose. "Enough for a hundred children at least. Besides, it must be time for them to go. The lovely things! Think of all the pleasure they will give! A sick child, and a bunch of flowers like these!" She took up a posy of velvet pansies and sweet-peas, set round with mignonette, and put it lovingly to her lips. "I remember—" She paused, and sighed, and then smiled.
"Yes, dear!" said Hildegarde, interrogatively. "The house where you were born?"
"One day I was in dreadful pain," said Rose,—"pain that seemed as if it would never end,—and a little child from a neighbor's house brought a bunch of Ragged Robin, and laid it on my pillow, and said, 'Poor Pinky! make she better!' I think I have never loved any other flower quite so much as Ragged Robin, since then. It is the only one I miss here. Do you want to hear the little rhyme I made about it, when I was old enough?"
Hildegarde answered by sitting down on the arm of the rustic seat, and throwing her arm round her friend's shoulder in her favorite fashion. "Such a pleasant Rosebud!" she murmured. "Tell now!"
And Rose told about—
RAGGED ROBIN.
O Robin, ragged Robin,
That stands beside the door,
The sweetheart of the country child,
The flower of the poor,
I love to see your cheery face,
Your straggling bravery;
Than many a stately garden bloom
You're dearer far to me.
For you it needs no sheltered nook,
No well-kept flower-bed;
By cottage porch, by roadside ditch,
You raise your honest head.
The small hedge-sparrow knows you well,
The blackbird is your friend;
With clustering bees and butterflies
Your pink-fringed blossoms bend.
O Robin, ragged Robin,
The dearest flower that grows,
Why don't you patch your tattered cloak?
Why don't you mend your hose?
Would you not like to prank it there
Within the border bright,
Among the roses and the pinks,
A courtly dame's delight?
"Ah no!" says jolly Robin,
"'T would never do for me;
The friend of bird and butterfly,
Like them I must be free.
"The garden is for stately folk,
The lily and the rose;
They'd scorn my coat of ragged pink,
Would flout my broken hose.
"Then let me bloom in wayside ditch,
And by the cottage door,
The sweetheart of the country child,
The flower of the poor."