In a pleasant, shady garden in Concord, Massachusetts, under a gnarled
old apple-tree, sat a very studious looking little person, bending
over a sheet of paper on which she was writing. She had made a seat
out of a tree stump, and a table by laying a board across two
carpenter's horses, whose owner was working in the house, and no
scholar writing a treatise on some deep subject could have been more
absorbed in his work than was the little girl in the garden.
For a whole long hour she wrote, frequently stopping to look off into
the distance and bite the end of her pencil with a very learned look,
then she would bend over her paper again and write hard and fast.
Finally, she laid down her pencil with an air of triumph, jumped up
from the stump and rushed toward the house.
"Mother! Anna! I've written a poem about the robin we found this
morning in the garden!" Dashing into the library she waved the paper
in the air with a still more excited cry: "Listen!" and dropped on the
floor to read her poem to a much thrilled audience of two. With great
dramatic effect she read her lines, glancing up from time to time to
see that she was producing the proper effect. This is what she read: