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My Robin By: Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849-1924) |
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ILLUSTRATED
BY
ALFRED BRENNAN
MY ROBIN There came to me among the letters I received last spring one which
touched me very closely. It was a letter full of delightful things but
the delightful thing which so reached my soul was a question. The writer
had been reading "The Secret Garden" and her question was this: "Did you
own the original of the robin? He could not have been a mere creature of
fantasy. I feel sure you owned him." I was thrilled to the centre of my
being. Here was some one who plainly had been intimate with robins
English robins. I wrote and explained as far as one could in a letter
what I am now going to relate in detail. I did not own the robin he owned me or perhaps we owned each other.
He was an English robin and he was a PERSON not a mere bird. An English
robin differs greatly from the American one. He is much smaller and
quite differently shaped. His body is daintily round and plump, his legs
are delicately slender. He is a graceful little patrician with an
astonishing allurement of bearing. His eye is large and dark and dewy;
he wears a tight little red satin waistcoat on his full round breast and
every tilt of his head, every flirt of his wing is instinct with
dramatic significance. He is fascinatingly conceited he burns with
curiosity he is determined to engage in social relations at almost any
cost and his raging jealousy of attention paid to less worthy objects
than himself drives him at times to efforts to charm and distract which
are irresistible. An intimacy with a robin an English robin is a
liberal education. This particular one I knew in my rose garden in Kent. I feel sure he was
born there and for a summer at least believed it to be the world. It was
a lovesome, mystic place, shut in partly by old red brick walls against
which fruit trees were trained and partly by a laurel hedge with a wood
behind it. It was my habit to sit and write there under an aged writhen
tree, gray with lichen and festooned with roses. The soft silence of it
the remote aloofness were the most perfect ever dreamed of. But let me
not be led astray by the garden. I must be firm and confine myself to
the Robin. The garden shall be another story. There were so many people
in this garden people with feathers, or fur who, because I sat so
quietly, did not mind me in the least, that it was not a surprising
thing when I looked up one summer morning to see a small bird hopping
about the grass a yard or so away from me. The surprise was not that he
was there but that he STAYED there or rather he continued to hop with
short reflective looking hops and that while hopping he looked at me
not in a furtive flighty way but rather as a person might tentatively
regard a very new acquaintance. The absolute truth of the matter I had
reason to believe later was that he did not know I was a person. I may
have been the first of my species he had seen in this rose garden world
of his and he thought I was only another kind of robin. I was too
though that was a secret of mine and nobody but myself knew it. Because
of this fact I had the power of holding myself STILL quite STILL and
filling myself with softly alluring tenderness of the tenderest when any
little wild thing came near me. "What do you do to make him come to you
like that?" some one asked me a month or so later. "What do you DO?" "I
don't know what I do exactly," I said. "Except that I hold myself very
still and feel like a robin." You can only do that with a tiny wild thing by being so tender of him
of his little timidities and feelings so adoringly anxious not to
startle him or suggest by any movement the possibility of your being a
creature who COULD HURT that your very yearning to understand his tiny
hopes and fears and desires makes you for the time cease to be quite a
mere human thing and gives you another and more exquisite sense which
speaks for you without speech. As I sat and watched him I held myself softly still and felt just that... Continue reading book >>
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