"Touch us gently, Father Time!
As we glide adown the stream."
She sang them bewitchingly. The music must have stolen into Mortimer's dream, for he slept a quieter sleep than before. Miss Daisy did not like that, and pouted quite prettily, and shook her finger at him.
"O, how tiresome you are!" she said. Then she sewed for ten minutes quite steadily.
"I guess I'll arrange your books, Rip Van Winkle! and when you wake up, a half century hence, you won't know them, they'll be in such good order!"
And facetious Miss Daisy broke out in such a wild, merry laugh, that an early robin, perched on a tree beside the window, ceased chirping, and listened to her.
Her fingers grew very busy with Mortimer's books. Having dusted them carefully, she commenced to place them in an old black-walnut book-case, which must have had an antique look fifty years ago. And Daisy went on laughing and talking to herself in a most comical manner.
"Here, Mr. Theocritus!" she cried, taking up that venerable poet, and placing him upside down, "I'll just set you on your head for absorbing all that stupid boy's attention one live-long evening, when I wanted to chat with him."
An author is supposed to know everything about his characters; but I cannot tell why Daisy placed Mortimer's poet in such an uncomfortable position, unless she thought that the blood might run into the head of Mr. Theocritus, and cause him to be taken off with a brain fever!
"And you, Mr. Byron," Daisy continued, "you're a very wicked young fellow! and I won't let you sit next to Mrs. Hemans!" so she placed Plutarch between them. "But you and Shelly," Daisy said, resting her hand on Keats, "you are different sort of persons; you are too earnest and beautiful to be impure; and you shall sit side by side between L. E. L. and our own Alice Cary. And Chatterton! poor boy Chatterton! I'll place you in that shadowy corner of the book-case, where the sunshine never comes!"
So Daisy made merry or sad, as the case might be, over her lover's few volumes; and when she had arranged them to suit her capricious self, she kissed her hand to Tom Hood, and locked them all—poets, romancers, and historians—in the black, sombre old book-case.