My Robin

(1912)

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