Lil' Shelf
Cover of System

System

Robert Louis Stevenson · 1885

ages 2 to 5poetryread aloudabout 28 seconds aloud

A child recites the tidy rules of being good and earning an orange, then tacks on a rather blunt line linking scruffiness to poverty. Short, but the moralising has aged oddly and is worth previewing.

From A Child's Garden of Verses. See the whole collection.

Every night my prayers I say,
    And get my dinner every day;
    And every day that I've been good,
    I get an orange after food.

The child that is not clean and neat,
    With lots of toys and things to eat,
    He is a naughty child, I'm sure—
    Or else his dear papa is poor.

Public domain. Text from A Child's Garden of Verses (Robert Louis Stevenson, 1885), via Project Gutenberg. View the source edition

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