Mary Had a Little Lamb

1830年5月24號 Sarah Josepha Hale第一次出版呢首詩，係跟件眞事。

細佬女 Mary Sawyer 養咗隻寵物羊，佢個大佬提意佢帶隻羊返學。 A commotion naturally ensued. Mary recalled:

"Visiting school that morning was a young man by the name of John Roulstone, a nephew of the Reverend Lemuel Capen, who was then settled in Sterling. It was the custom then for students to prepare for college with ministers, and for this purpose Mr. Roulstone was studying with his uncle. The young man was very much pleased with the incident of the lamb; and the next day he rode across the fields on horseback to the little old schoolhouse and handed me a slip of paper which had written upon it the three original stanzas of the poem..."^[1]

There are two competing theories on the origin of this poem. One holds that Roulstone wrote the first four lines and that the final twelve lines, more moralistic and much less childlike than the first, were composed by Sarah Josepha Hale; the other is that Hale was responsible for the entire poem.

Mary Sawyer's house, located in Sterling, Massachusetts, was destroyed by arson on August 12, 2007.^[2] A statue representing Mary's Little Lamb stands in the town center. The Redstone School, which was built in 1798, was purchased by Henry Ford and relocated to Sudbury, Massachusetts. It now sits on the grounds of Longfellow's Wayside Inn.