Bedtime stories

When I was little, my mom always made sure she read to me. Sometimes she read from the Bible, Disney books, Golden Books, and some longer fiction as I got a little older. However, there was one book that got my attention more than Pecos Bill's adventures with his lasso: Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses. It is a book of poetry that I still have. Here is one of my favorite poems from it:

Foreign Lands
by Robert Louis Stevenson

Up into the cherry tree
Who should climb but little me?
I held the trunk with both my hands
And looked abroad in foreign lands.

I saw the next door garden lie,
Adorned with flowers, before my eye,
And many pleasant places more
That I had never seen before.

I saw the dimpling river pass
And be the sky's blue looking-glass;
The dusty roads go up and down
With people tramping in to town.

If I could find a higher tree
Farther and farther I should see,
To where the grown-up river slips
Into the sea among the ships,

To where the road on either hand
Lead onward into fairy land,
Where all the children dine at five,
And all the playthings come alive.