TO MY SISTER

These books you find three weeks behind

Your honored anniversary

Make me, I fear, to here appear

Mayhap a trifle cursory.—

Yet while the Muse must thus refuse

The chords that fall caressfully,

She seems to stir the publisher

And dealer quite successfully.

As to our birthdays — let‘ em run

Until they whir and whiz!

Read Robert Louis Stevenson,

And hum these lines of his:—

“The eternal dawn, beyond a doubt,

Shall break on hill and plain

And put all stars and candles out

Ere we be young again.”