T. Tembarom: (Frances Hodgson Burnett Classics Collection) - Paperback

by Frances Hodgson Burnett (Author)

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."