It was quite by chance that Mrs. Runkle one day came upon a poem of her daughter's which she was anxious to have judged on its merits by that keen critic, the editor-in-chief. With no clue to the authorship, he was delighted with its strength, its unusual form, and the splendid swing of the lines. The poem was at once ordered into "The World's Best Literature," and Edmund Clarence Stedman afterward included it in his "American Anthology". So good rank did Runkle's work take in the judgment of two eminent critics, when she was hardly more than a school-girl, that she was sent to Miss Bracket's school, a fashionable girls' boarding school in New York, till she was thirteen, when she was taken away because of delicate health. From that time she was schooled in the large home library, and studied with her mother.