Harper's Round Table, January 5, 1897

Copyright, 1897, by Harper & Brothers. All Rights Reserved.

It was I who called him the Little Bishop. His name was Phillips Brooks Sanderson, but one seldom heard it at full length, since Phil was quite enough for an urchin just in his first trousers, and those assumed somewhat prematurely. He was Phil, therefore, to the village, but always the dear lovable Little Bishop to me. His home was in Bonnie Eagle; it was only because of his mother's illness that he was spending the summer with his uncle and aunt in Pleasant River. I could see the little brown house from my window. The white road, with strips of tufted green between the wheel tracks, curled dustily up to the very door-step, and inside the wire screen-door was a wonderful drawn-in rug, shaped like half a pie, with Welcome in saffron letters on its gray surface. I liked the Bishop's aunt; I liked to see her shake the Welcome rug before breakfast, flinging the cheery word out into the summer sunshine like a bright greeting to the new day; I liked to see her go to the screen-door a dozen times a day; open it a crack, and chase an imaginary fly from the sacred precincts within; I liked to see her come up the cellar steps into the side garden, appearing mysteriously as from the bowels of the earth, carrying a shining pan of milk in both hands, and disappearing through the beds of hollyhocks and sunflowers to the pig-pen or the hen-house.
I had not yet grown fond of the uncle, and neither had Phil, for that matter; in fact Uncle Abner was rather a difficult person to grow fond of, with his fiery red beard, his freckled skin, and his gruff way of speaking—for there were no children in the brown house to smooth the creases from his forehead or the roughness from his voice.
I was sitting under the shade of the great maple one morning early when I first saw the Little Bishop. A tiny figure came down the grass-grown road leading a cow by a rope. If it had been a small boy and a small cow, a middle-sized boy and an ordinary cow, or a grown man and a big cow, I might not have noticed them; but it was the combination of an infinitesimal boy and a huge cow that attracted my attention. I could not guess the child's years; I only knew that he was small for his age, whatever it was. The cow was a dark red beast with a crumpled horn, a white star on her forehead, and a large surprised sort of eye. She had, of course, two eyes, and both were surprised, but the left one had an added hint of amazement in it by virtue of a few white hairs lurking accidentally in the centre of the eyebrow.