Peggy in Toyland

by Archibald Marshall

Now children and dolls are sometimes naughty, and must be corrected, but their heads should never be banged against anything hard. There are plenty of ways of correcting them without doing that, and every nice mother knows it. Peggy knew it as well as anybody, although she was a year younger than Mabel; so directly she saw what was being done she cried out to her nurse how cruel it was.

Mabel stopped beating the wooden doll’s head against the road, and stared at Peggy, and at Rose, who was sitting in the pram; and she must have fallen in love with Rose at first sight, because her face became quite different when she looked at her.

While Mabel was looking at Rose, Peggy was looking at the wooden doll; and the more she looked the more her heart went out to her. She was not what you would call a beautiful doll, and perhaps never had been. One of her legs had been amputated at the knee, one of her arms at the shoulder, and the other at the elbow. Her face was round and open; so were her eyes. Her nose was gone. The less said about her hair the better; she would never need another shampoo. She was dressed in a loose frock of spotted red flannel, tied round the waist with an old piece of black hair-ribbon.

Such was this doll, who was destined to play so large a part in Peggy’s life, as she first saw her; and it may seem odd to some people that she should instantly have loved her. Perhaps being such a kind little girl, and feeling so dreadfully sorry to see the doll so badly treated, had something to do with it; but it could not have been only that. No, there was something about this wooden doll which made Peggy love her at once, and when you have read this story, perhaps you will be able to understand what it was.

Peggy told Mabel that she ought not to knock her doll’s head on the road, and Mabel pointed at Rose, and said: “If I had a doll like that, I wouldn’t want to knock ’er ’ead on the road.”

It was then that the idea first came to Peggy that she would much rather have the wooden doll than Rose; and she asked her nurse if she might give Rose to Mabel, and ask Mabel to give her the wooden doll instead.

Nurse said: “The idea of such a thing!” and told Peggy to come on. Of course she was right not to let Peggy exchange dolls there and then, because she didn’t know whether Peggy’s mother would like it. But where she was wrong was when she said, “Fancy wanting to exchange a beautiful doll like Rose for an ugly old wooden thing like that!” She didn’t understand that what she called beauty had nothing to do with it at all. You don’t love a person for their looks, but just because you can’t help loving them. And Peggy was quite right to love the wooden doll more than Rose, as afterwards turned out.

Fortunately, Peggy’s mother understood these things better than the nurse. The end of it was that Peggy was allowed to give Rose to Mabel, with all her clothes except the hat, which had come on the same birthday as she had, but had not belonged especially to her. And Mabel gave Peggy the wooden doll, but without its red flannel dress, which Peggy’s mother thought might contain germs.

Now that the wooden doll belonged to Peggy she had to give her a name. She called her Daffodil, because the daffodils were out in the garden when she came. But the name never stuck to her. She was always called Wooden in the family circle; and presently it was forgotten that she had ever had any other name.