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There came to me among the letters I received last spring one whichtouched me very closely. It was a letter full of delightful things butthe delightful thing which so reached my soul was a question. The writerhad been reading "The Secret Garden" and her question was this: "Did youown the original of the robin? He could not have been a mere creature offantasy. I feel sure you owned him." I was thrilled to the centre of mybeing. Here was some one who plainly had been intimate withrobins—English robins. I wrote and explained as far as one could in aletter 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 Englishrobin differs greatly from the American one. He is much smaller andquite differently shaped. His body is daintily round and plump, his legsare delicately slender. He is a graceful little patrician with anastonishing allurement of bearing. His eye is large and dark and dewy;he wears a tight little red satin waistcoat on his full round breast andevery tilt of his head, every flirt of his wing is instinct withdramatic significance. He is fascinatingly conceited—he burns withcuriosity—he is determined to engage in social relations at almost anycost and his raging jealousy of attention paid to less worthy objectsthan himself drives him at times to efforts to charm and distract whichare irresistible. An intimacy with a robin—an English robin—is aliberal education.
This particular one I knew in my rose-garden in Kent. I feel sure he wasborn there and for a summer at least believed it to be the world. It wasa lovesome, mystic place, shut in partly by old red brick walls againstwhich fruit trees were trained and partly by a laurel hedge with a woodbehind it. It was my habit to sit and write there under an aged writhentree, gray with lichen and festooned with roses. The soft silence ofit—the remote aloofness—were the most perfect ever dreamed of. But letme not be led astray by the garden. I must be firm and confine myself tothe Robin. The garden shall be another story. There were so many peoplein this garden—people with feathers, or fur—who, because I sat soquietly, did not mind me in the least, that it was not a surprisingthing when I looked up one summer morning to see a small bird hoppingabout the grass a yard or so away from me. The surprise was not that hewas there but that he STAYED there—or rather he continued to hop—withshort reflective-looking hops and that while hopping he looked at me—notin a furtive flighty way but rather as a person might tentativelyregard a very new acquaintance. The absolute truth of the matter I hadreason to believe later was that he did not know I was a person. I mayhave been the first of my species he had seen in this rose-garden worldof his and he thought I was only another kind of robin. I wastoo—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 STILLand filling myself with softly alluring tenderness of the tenderest whenany little wild thing came near me. "What do you do to make him come toyou 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 verystill and feel like a robin."
You can only do that with a tiny wild thing by being so tender ofhim—of his little timidities and fe