And I hope some day to find
Myself capable of composing.
It was my heart's delight
To compose on a sentimental subject
If it came in my mind just right
This would show that the Muse was getting in its work, as I might say, even while yet Julia was a little nut-brown maid trudging along to school with bare feet that looked like the back of a warty toad. In my visions I see her now standing in front of the teacher's desk, soaking the first three joints of her thumb in her rosebud mouth, and trying to work her off toe into a knot-hole in the floor, while outside, the turtle-dove and the masculine Michigan mule softly coo to their mates.
A portrait of the author appears on the cover of the little volume. It is a very striking face. There are lines of care about the mouth—that is, part way around the mouth. They did not reach all the way around because they didn't have time. Lines of care are willing to do anything that is reasonable, but they can't reach around the North Park without getting fatigued. These lines of care and pain look to the student of physiognomy as though the author had lost a good deal of sleep trying to compose obituary poems. The brow is slightly drawn, too, as though her corns might be hurting her. Julia wears her hair plain, like Alfred Tennyson and Sitting Bull. It hangs down her back in perfect abandon and wild profusion, shedding bear's oil ever the collar of her delaine dress, regardless of expense.
I can not illustrate or describe the early vision of dimpled loveliness, which Julia presented in her childhood, better than by giving a little gem from "My Infant Days:"
When I was a little infant,
And I lay in mother's arms,