ALL THE PRETTY HORSES

Far more than the sprightly ""Three Jovial Huntsmen,"" this 40-word lullaby was made for Jeffers' sort of reverie. The floral bedspread covering her little gift at the beginning and end becomes a field where she romps on the backs of ""blacks and bays, dapples and grays,"" all of them standing, prancing and resting on the flower tops in a dreamlike revision of natural scale. Jeffers seems to take her mugging child less seriously than she does the lovingly crosshatched horses and foliage, for which pretty is surely the word -- a characterization that pinpoints both the pictures' ""classy"" appeal and their limitations.