Page:Famous Single Poems (1924).djvu/232

 to wear, who really have no just reason for the complaint, while, on the other hand, multitudes might make the same complaint with truth as well as sorrow!”

When she reached home, she sat down and wrote a poem around this thought—a poem of thirty-nine lines, written on a single sheet of paper. She took it with her on a visit to New York, intending to show it to some friends, “had the manuscript in her hand on leaving the cars near Twenty-sixth Street, and passing through the crowd it was lost.”

What was her astonishment to discover in Harper’s Weekly some months later her poem incorporated in a much longer one. The first nine lines of her poem had been used as the introduction, and the other thirty lines included at the close. The inference was, of course, that the author of the poem in Harper’s Weekly had picked up Miss Peck’s verses, and found in them the inspiration for his more ambitious effort.

It would seem that a story so absurd, and put forward as this one was without the slightest effort at substantiation beyond the worthless confirmation given it by the girl’s father, would drop dead of its own weight; but, as has already been remarked in the course of these pages, there are always a lot of people seemingly ready to believe anything, and a number