From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:
Alma is not American. She is English. England is a beautiful country. Peter Rabbit comes from England. Also Mother Goose. Mother Goose wrote all those beautiful poems that Alma reads to me when she wants me to go to sleep. Like “Hi Diddle Diddle the Cat and the Fiddle.” I love that one. I always think of one of Grandmother’s special blue and white soup plates running away with one of those silver spoons with ugly mermaids on them. Alma says that England had other people besides Mother Goose and Beatrix Potter, that’s the lady who wrote “Peter Rabbit” and who wrote other wonderful poems. There is the man who wrote that lovely poem that says the people who pray best are the ones that love best every single thing that God made, even tiny things like ants and maybe even fleas. Of course I suppose it must be hard to love a flea while it is biting you but then it can’t help being a flea. Grandfather says that nothing can help being what it is, that if our parents are fleas or mice or snakes we must also be fleas or mice or snakes and that your parents couldn’t help it either because of what their parents were.
The poem Hilda recalls is Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The following stanza is at the end of Part VII:
He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.