In 1946, reporter Marguerite Henry traveled to Chincoteague Island to write about Virginia’s wild ponies and accidentally fell in love with a trembling-legged newborn with a wet nose named Misty. Her heart jumped into her throat and she “nearly choked,” she wrote later, when she saw the foal, “new as the morning,” lying adorably on the beach “like a slightly rumpled bath mat.” She had to have .