Child's Crib Quilt

In the foreground of this pictorial quilt, a young girl sits on a grassy hillside reading a book. The cover bears the initials RLS, which refer to the poet Robert Louis Stevenson, who wrote the stanza embroidered in the sky above the landscape. The stanza is from the poem "Travel," which appeared in Stevenson's 1885 collection A Child's Garden of Verses. The embroidered stanza reads:I should like to rise and goWhere the golden apples growWhere in sunshine reaching outEastern cities miles aboutAre with mosque and minaretAmong sandy gardens set.Stevenson's poem invites the young reader to imagine places—as does the quilt, with its depiction of a city in the distance.