Page:My Friend Annabel Lee (1903).pdf/202

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"What sort of work would you do?" I asked.

"I might wash fine bits of lace," said my friend Annabel Lee, "and lay them out upon a sunny grass-plot to bleach and dry. Or I might pick berries and take them to market. Or I might sit in a doorway making baskets—I should make beautiful little baskets. Or I might care for a small garden, or a flock of geese—to feed them with grains and keep them from straying away. 'So many hours must I tend my flock, so many hours must I sport myself, so many hours must I contemplate'—I should do all these things while tending my flock, and I should tend my flock well. I should do all my work well, so that the food on the deal table, under the yew-tree, would taste as if it had been earned.

"But would it not be strange," said my friend Annabel Lee, eating daintily of