To have Dan put camphor on my poor little head.”
This unusual burst of genius brought down the house, and Demi was obliged to read it again, a somewhat difficult task, as there was no punctuation whatever, and the little poet’s breath gave out before he got to the end of some of the long lines.
“He will be a Shakespeare yet,” said Aunt Jo, laughing as if she would die, for this poetic gem reminded her of one of her own, written at the age of ten, and beginning gloomily,—
“I wish I had a quiet tomb,
Beside a little rill;
Where birds, and bees, and butterflies,
Would sing upon the hill.”
“Come on, Tommy. If there is as much ink inside your paper as there is outside, it will be a long composition,” said Mr. Bhaer, when Demi had been induced to tear himself from his poem and sit down.
“It isn’t a composition, it’s a letter. You see, I forgot all about its being my turn till after school, and then I didn’t know what to have, and there wasn’t time to read up; so I thought you wouldn’t mind my taking a letter that I wrote to my Grandma. It’s something about birds in it, so I thought it would do.”
With this long excuse, Tommy plunged into a sea of ink and floundered through, pausing now and then to decipher one of his own flourishes.