My Robin

My Robin

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Burnett #13 in our series by Frances Hodgson Burnett
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Title: My Robin
Author: Frances Hodgson Burnett
Release Date: March, 2004 [EBook #5304] [Yes, we are more than one
year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on June 25, 2002]
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MY ROBIN BY FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT
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