Memoirs of a London doll

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO · DALLAS ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO MACMILLAN & CO., Limited LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. TORONTO
Mr. Punch Tossed the Baby Out of the Window.
MEMOIRS OF A LONDON DOLL
Written by Herself
EDITED BY MRS. FAIRSTAR
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY CLARA WHITEHILL HUNT AND ILLUSTRATIONS BY EMMA L. BROCK
New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1922 All rights reserved
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA Copyright, 1922, By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and printed. Published August, 1922. Press of J. J. Little & Ives Company New York, U. S. A.
When I was a girl, taking many a long journey in the land of storybooks, my favorite stories were of two kinds. One was about boys and girls who lived in the country, spending long, happy days wading in rollicking brooks, riding on fragrant loads of hay, picking blueberries, playing in the great barn, making pets of turtles and field mice and all sorts of creatures. The reason I dearly loved these stories was because, in summer, I was a country girl myself, on the beautiful Massachusetts farm of my great-great-grandfathers. I loved to hear my mother tell stories of her girlhood, about her good times with the boys and girls of the little red schoolhouse, about singing school and cattle show and sugaring off and endless pleasures delightfully unlike those of my own experience. The queer, old-fashioned clothes that we children found, on rainy days in grandmother’s attic, the spinning wheels and candle molds and quilting frames, the quaint cradle, the hair trunk, the “till chest,” the yellowed diary and account books in the brass-handled desk, all made us children feel very close to those bygone days which our elders told about on evenings when nearby uncles and aunts and cousins gathered in grandmother’s sitting room. How small and quiet we children tried to make ourselves those evenings in the sweet summer dark, hoping our parents would forget to say “Bed-time for the young fry,” and drive us away from their jolly and thrilling reminiscences of old times. Our best-loved story was one about plucky great-grandmother and how she frightened a bear away without a gun. And how we envied our parents when we heard that they had played Indian and early settler in the ruins of the very blockhouse which our forbears and their neighbors had built for refuge from King Philip’s redskins back in the sixteen-seventies.