From 8-year old Hilda Firestone’s diary:
It rained today. All the children brought their lunches to school, and while we were eating them, Miss Hare read to us. She read us a fable of Aesop called “The Fox and the Crow.” I thought about it all afternoon. I thought that my Grandmother is just as silly. As that crow was. She would have spit the cheese out of her mouth if a fox had told her that she sang like a nightingale. While we were having our arithmetic lesson, I tried to make a poem out of the fable.
This is my poem….
A silly old crow whom I don’t know
Once stole a piece of cheese,
And flew away into a tree
To eat it at her ease.That is as far as I got. Miss Hare saw me. She said that I shouldn’t write poems while she was trying to teach us something useful. Why isn’t a poem useful? If it makes you happy, and I should think anything that makes you happy is useful. Of course, Miss Hare doesn’t look happy. People say that she is an old maid. She must be at least twenty-five, but later on, when I told this to Grandfather, he said that children must obey their teachers, so I just put my poem away. Maybe I can finish it in bed tonight, and it will keep me from thinking all the things that I am afraid of, like the picture of the men that hangs on the hall wall across from my room. During the day, I am too busy to think about it, but at night I think they will come out of the frame and steal me away.