The youngest person ever to qualify for the National Spelling Bee was running around in a stream with a friend, hunting for rocks. Suddenly, she came charging up the bank and headed straight for her mother.

"Hold on to that basalt," Lori Anne Madison said in a bossy 6-year-old's voice, "and do not drop it."

"Go away," her mother, Sorina Madison, said playfully.

She talks at 100 mph. In the last few weeks, she has won major awards in both swimming and math, but one accomplishment above all has made her an overnight national celebrity: This week, the precocious girl from Lake Ridge, Va., will be onstage with youngsters more than twice her age and twice her size as one of 278 spellers who have qualified for the Scripps National Spelling Bee.

"She's like a teenager in a 6-year-old body," Sorina said. "Her brain, she understands things way ahead of her age."

It's hard to argue with that, especially after spending a couple of hours with Lori Anne and her friends as they splashed in the waters on a sunny day at the Scotts Run Nature Preserve in the suburbs of Washington, D.C.