What is your use in this world now, pray?
"Bend your head closer; my secret I'll tell:
There's a baby-bird hid in my tiny blue shell." 

Little green bud, all covered with dew,
Answer my question and answer it true;
What were you made for, and why do you stay
Clinging so close to the twig all the day?
"Hid in my green sheath, some day to unclose,
Nestles the warm, glowing heart of a rose."Dear, little baby-girl, dainty and fair,
Sweetest of flowers, of jewels most rare,
Surely there's no other use for you here
Than just to be petted and played with, you dear!
"Oh, a wonderful secret I'm coming to know,
Just a baby like me, to a woman shall grow."
Ah, swiftly the bird from the nest flies away,
And the bud to a blossom unfolds day by day,
While the woman looks forth in my baby-girl's eyes,
Through her joys and her sorrows, her tears and surprise--
Too soon shall the years bring this gift to her cup,
God keep her, my woman who's now growing up!
BY KATHRINE LENTE STEVENSON.

Who said that I was a naughty dog,
And could not behave if I tried?
I only chewed up Katrina's French doll,
And shook her rag one until it cried.

WHY HE WAS WHIPPED.
He was seven years old, lived in Cheyenne, and his name was Tommy.
Moreover he was going to school for the first time in his life. Out here
little people are not allowed to attend school when they are five or
six, for the Law says: "Children under seven must not go to school."But now Tommy was seven and had been to school two weeks, and such
delightful weeks! Every day mamma listened to long accounts of how "me
and Dick Ray played marbles," and "us fellers cracked the whip." There
was another thing that he used to tell mamma about, something that
in those first days he always spoke of in the most subdued tones,
and that--I am sorry to record it of any school, much more a Cheyenne
school--was the numerous whippings that were administered to various
little 

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