Hilda Conkling is the younger daughter of Mrs. Grace Hazard Conkling, Assistant Professor of English at Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts. At the time of writing, Hilda has just passed her ninth birthday. Her sister, Elsa, is two years her senior. The children and their mother live all the year round in Northampton, and glimpses of the woods and hills surrounding the little town crop up again and again in these poems. This is Emily Dickinson's country, and there is a reminiscent sameness in the fauna and flora of her poems in these. The two little girls go to a school a few blocks from where they live. In the afternoons, they take long walks with their mother, or play in the garden while she writes. On rainy days, there are books and Mrs. Conkling's piano, which is not just a piano, for Mrs. Conkling is a musician, and we may imagine that the children hear a special music as they certainly read a special literature. By "special" I do not mean a prescribed course (for dietitians of the mind are quite as apt to be faddists as dietitians of the stomach), but just that sort of reading which a person who passionately loves books would most want to introduce her children to. And here I think we have the answer to the why of Hilda. She and her sister have been their mother's close companions ever since they were born. They have never known that somewhat equivocal relationship--a child with its nurse. They have never been for hours at a time in contact with an elementary intelligence. If Hilda had shown these poems to even the most sympathetic nurse, what would have been the result? In the first place, they would, in all probability, have been lost, since Hilda does not write her poems, but tells them; in the second, they would have been either extravagantly praised or laughingly commented upon. In either case, the fine flower of creation would most certainly have been injured. Then again, blessed though many of the nurses of childhood undoubtedly are (and we all remember them), they have no means of answering the thousand and one questions of an eager, opening mind. To be an adequate companion to childhood, one must know so many things. Hilda is fortunate in her mother, for if these poems reveal one thing more than another it is that Mrs. Conkling is dowered with an admirable tact. In the dedication poem to her mother, the little girl says: "If I sing, you listen; If I think, you know." No finer tribute could be offered by one person to another than the contented certainty of understanding in those two lines.