"There was a little girl." Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882). Poems of Home: III. Fun for Little Folk. Bliss Carman, et al., eds. 1904. The World's Best Poetry. I. Of Home: of Friendship

Bliss Carman, et al., eds. The World’s Best Poetry.
Volume I. Of Home: of Friendship. 1904.

Poems of Home: III. Fun for Little Folk

“There was a little girl”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882)


THERE was a little girl,
And she had a little curl
Right in the middle of her forehead.
When she was good
She was very, very good,	5
And when she was bad she was horrid.

One day she went upstairs,
When her parents, unawares,
In the kitchen were occupied with meals,
And she stood upon her head	10
In her little trundle-bed,
And then began hooraying with her heels.

Her mother heard the noise,
And she thought it was the boys
A-playing at a combat in the attic;	15
But when she climbed the stair,
And found Jemima there,
She took and she did spank her most emphatic.