From the composer's notes:

When I consulted Miss Forrester what kind of poetry she would like me to choose for the CBC commission, she said: "I do not understand why composers thought for the past 300 years that an alto voice is suited only for tragic poetry dealing with death or words which portray some vicious, old witch! I am a happy person and very fond of poets who try to express the thoughts of children." Her statement soon brought me to three poems from Robert Louis Stevenson's collection "A Child's Garden of Verse".

In the first song of the cycle, KEEPSAKE MILL, the orchestral sound in the beginning suggests the continuous motion of the wheel in the mill. It stops for a moment with the words "Sounds of the village grow stiller and stiller". After a few bars of tranquility, the motion starts over again, and grows to a dynamic climax after the line "Heroes and soldiers we all come home". In the last part of the song - when the children, now as adults, come back to the mill, after many years, and reminisce this meeting place of their childhood - the motion of the music becomes slower and more distant until it completely fades out from the high sounds of two flutes down to the deep pianissimo of bassoons and a tuba.

The second song MY SHADOW starts with a rather unusual 15 bars long solo of the Timpani; its trills and glissando suggest the strange feeling of the child being followed on every step by its shadow. The voice enters in the same mysterious mood, but the music changes often the colour, texture and rhythmic patterns, following the meaning of the words. A jumpy rhythm accompanies the words "When I jump into my bed", a chromatic voice line is used on the words "the way he likes to grow" and "Which is always very slow" and a playful accompaniment with the words "he hasn't got a notion of how children ought to play, and a contemptuous descending line pictures the words "he is a coward, you can see". A few bars later this disdainful motive is used for a short orchestral interlude which suddenly stops at the end of a crescendo. The mood completely changes into the lyric atmosphere of the early morning hour "before the sun was up" "and the lazy shadow was fast asleep". The orchestra introduces this colour with high string chords (in ten and later even 15 parts) against a sustained "A" in several octaves in the winds, triangle and vibraphone, and a soft melody in the harp. Together with this texture we can hear in the concluding bars also the timpani glissandi of the beginning, followed by a "lazy" descending chromatic motive in the low register of the tuba.

In the last song MY KINGDOM a little water well is seen with the eyes of the child as a big sea with boats, bees, sparrows and minnows which appear all as a part of the child's own big kingdom. The sounds of nature in the music are interrupted by a royal fanfare after the child exclaims "there are no other queens than me!" A solo trombone follows which announces with its "marcato" motive the mother's call for dinner. While the child parts very distressed from the well, the music brings back for a few bars the opening colour of sprinkling water. A few clumsy, syncopated chords in the trombones announce the steps of a heavy nurse who takes the child home. The concluding few bars in the orchestra show the growing anger of the child taken away from its beautiful playground. The last chord in the orchestra is cut off by a stroke of the whip. An expression of revenge against the unfeeling governess!