Amy could not help laughing at his expression of amazement.
“Well, the person who reads it will have to decide whether it is poetry. I should n’t like to say myself. But I’m trying to tell a story in verse, and some way it does n’t come out right.”
“Let me hear it,” said Fritz, “and I ’ll tell you what the matter is.” His tone was one of extreme confidence, and, of course, having let the cat out of the bag, as she had never meant to do, there was nothing now for Amy but to give Fritz the chance to hear what she had written.
The story was a romantic one about a young man who had walked in a garden with a girl he admired, for whom he had gathered a rose which she accepted warmly. Then came the catastrophe,—
The cloud of war o’er the country broke,
When the call to arms was given,
The lover went, to the maid he spoke,
“We shall meet, dearest love, in Heaven.”
“He was mighty sure he’d be killed, was n’t he?” said Fritz. “But go on,” for Amy began to close her blank book.
So Amy read the stanza in which the young soldier’s death was described, and then she came to the climax, which, in her secret heart, she considered very fine.
Ere long she died; in her hand they found
A rose all withered and sere,
They buried it with her in the ground,
For they said, “She has held it dear.”
