and his committee had examined a child eight years of age.

The little girl sat down without agitation, and she was asked to write on one of the following four subjects:

1 — I am only eight years old. 2 — You are my enemy, O examination. 3 — The blank page that awaits me. 4 — The sky of Paris.

... And Minou handed in her paper after twenty minutes! The president of the society declared that she astonished them all, until it seemed to them that some other person must be sitting at the writing paper, and that one cannot believe this little girl capable of giving work of so high an order!!

Upon the announcement of the results the uproar around Minou Drouet broke out anew: the papers scrambled to gather her news and publish her pictures — and, more important than all this, her poems and her letters; and some named her “the Mozart of poetry.” Whoever reads her verse cannot miss that fresh, childlike breath, as though it were a gift from heaven!

What does it matter to us that Minou Drouet should be a foundling girl, descended from no known stock? What does it matter to us that some make light of her colored thoughts, and others doubt her artistic imagination... Enough for us that she is a beneficent impetus to letters and poetry — a world of prospects that will add to our hoped-for tomorrow a blessed

handful of joy...

We pass on to our readers below some passages of her verse never before translated into Arabic:

How many nights I have sat watching the rabbits play,

while the moon spreads over the meadow its blue shadows,

beneath the trunk of a dead oak, reflecting the map

of night upon the face of the sky,

... the long hours pass, and I lie stretched

on the grass,

gazing at the rabbits, in their white silken wool,

darting off headlong...

their dancing noses going

before them...

like the mumbling of an old woman at prayer!!

... Here is the raging sea, like a huge-bodied cat

rolling in the foam, coming toward me;

so I open the window to receive it,

and

feel my cheek grow wet with delight!

I am mad with joy. I have received a book!

It is a book — the one thing that grants

complete happiness,

and happiness is rarely complete!

It is joy ringing in the eyes, in the fingers,

in the heart and in the mind,

for when we open it, life unfolds before us:

as though we had opened a goldfinch's cage, or a garden gate

at night!