Real People in Books
THE dispute over who really was the Mary who had 1- the little lamb is still ramifying. It began, you may, recollect, with Mr. Henry Ford being so impressed with the merits of the poem that he restored the old village school at Sudbury, Mass., whither, he was assured, the lamb had followed its young mistress. On the hallowed wall was placed a bronze tablet commem- orating one Mary Elizabeth Sawyer, 1806-1889, as the Mary of the poem, Rebecca Kimball, the teacher, John Roulstone, the author of the first twelve lines, and Sarah Josepha Hale, " whose genius completed the poem in its present form."
Then, however, tidings of the establishment of this literary shrine reachecran eighty-six-year-old lady named 1VIrs. Mary Hughes, now living at Southend-on-Sea, who declares that she herself is the original Mary. According to Mrs. HUghes, the author of the poem was Mrs. Sarah Josepha Hale; formerly Miss Burl, of Newport, New Hampshire, who visited Mary's farmhouse hOme in Wales eighty years ago, and was touched to see the affection with which the farmer's little daughter tended an orphan lamb. Mary Thomas, as she then was, had two pet lambs, Nell and Billy, which, she said recently, would follow me everywhere. One day Billy followed me to the school, and frisked and gambolled • about the room. He caused such a commotion that the school- mistress, a Miss Coward, made me take him away." And she has a letter written by Miss Burl, dated from Upper Clapham, London, in 1852, containing a reference to her as " Mary, who had the little lamb." And now the claim is being made that the poem has long existed hi Germany and is regarded there as of old German origin. Perhaps further research will reveal a whole regiment of infant Marys, all over the world, who were followed to school by their pet lambs.
Three other infants rendered familiar by verses we all know have a clear title to their fame. Little Jack Horner Was steward of Glastonbury Abbey. At the dissolution of the monasteries he put his thumb into the rich " pie containing the title deeds of the manor of Mells, and pulled out that delectable " plum." And the original of Whittier's happy little " bare-foot boy, with cheek of tan," so long a favourite recitation of school children, is an old bearded gardener named Francis Marston, who still works on the Oak Knoll estate of the Whittier family at Danvers, Mass., where the poet first saw him. The daughter of the learned Dean Liddell, who was the Alice of Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, has been much in the public eye of late.
The late Frederic R. Evans, who died recently, after having been Rector of Bedworth, in Warwickshire, for 'More than half a century, was the original of Tom Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss, and George Eliot, his sister, was Maggie Tulliver. The winsome lady referred to in the famous song, of which two lines run :— " I'd crowns resign to call thee mine, -
Sweet Lass of Richmond Hill,"
was no Londoner, as they sometimes claim down Twicken- ham way, but Frances I'Anson, who lived at. Prior House, and then at Hill House, in the Yorkshire Richmond. - She.knarried, in-1787, Leonard-McNally, an Irish barrister,
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