Peggy in Toyland

by Archibald Marshall

The news of the imprisonment of a human child, and of four dolls, two at least of whom were highly respected, must have spread; for as they walked along everybody seemed to recognize them, and they were followed by an ever increasing crowd of dolls, who seemed to be greatly excited by their reappearance. The Lord Chancellor was in a high state of delight at the attention they were receiving. If he had a fault, it was a slight but excusable vanity. By his own labours he had raised himself to his present proud position, and thought it only natural that everybody who saw him should be extremely interested in him. He was generally accompanied by his secretary when he walked about the streets of Dolltown, so that if he happened to go unrecognized the secretary could tell the people who he was. But this time he had left him behind, to write out the notes he had taken in the Hall of Audience, and walked alone with Peggy and Wooden.

He certainly received a great deal of attention, and was at first very pleased with it, as I have said. But by-and-by he became a good deal less pleased.

For the crowd was not so good-tempered as it had been when they had all walked to prison together. Most of the dolls that composed it made a lot of fuss over Peggy and Wooden, whom they were pleased to see let out of prison, but they did not seem at all pleased to see the Lord Chancellor, and he had to listen to some unpleasant remarks about himself for his share in what had happened.

These remarks caused him a good deal of pain, and, when he understood that he was not sharing in the popularity that Peggy and Wooden enjoyed, he began to explain to everybody who would listen to him that he had been against sending anybody to prison from the first, and that it was entirely owing to him that Peggy and Wooden had been let out. But nobody did listen to him very carefully, and one rather rude Dutch doll actually said to him, “Oh, dry up, you silly old fool, and don’t talk so much.” This distressed him very much. He had never in his life been called a silly old fool before, and the phrase rankled. He did not try to excuse himself any more, but kept on repeating “silly old fool” under his breath, so as to see if it was really as bad as it sounded.

Wooden’s house was situated in a handsome terrace, which had a gate and a little wooden lodge at each end of it, to keep the houses private. This was a good thing, for the crowd had to stay outside the gates. It was nice to have them so enthusiastic, but they might have made themselves a nuisance if they had swarmed about the house itself, and looked in at the windows, and dirtied the front door steps.

Wooden had told Peggy what a nice house she had, and was pleased to be able to show it to her. It was a handsome, rather old-fashioned, wooden dolls’ house of three stories and six rooms, with a staircase running up the middle. It was nicely furnished, too, with beautifully-made dolls’ furniture and ornaments. Any little girl would have been overjoyed at having such a dolls’ house given to her to play with. To Peggy it was even more delightful than if she had had it as a toy, because it was of a size that made it possible for her to use it as a real house. Instead of putting her hand inside the rooms with great care, so as not to disturb the arrangements, she could go into all the rooms herself and use the things in them.

It was a handsome house of three stories

I know that it is not customary in stories to talk about the rooms and furniture of a house before your characters have entered it; but in this case it is all right, because the front of the house stood open, and Peggy saw nearly everything inside it before they went in.

The rooms were a good deal larger than those in most dolls’ houses. I mean not only larger because the house had grown up, so to speak, but because they would hold more dolls and more furniture. In a dolls’ house it is sometimes awkward to have a doll or a piece of furniture that takes up nearly the whole of a room, and even in good ones it does not often happen that the rooms are big enough to accommodate many dolls, or more than a few pieces of furniture. But there was quite a lot of furniture in the rooms of Wooden’s house, and although they were all square, and of the same size, which gave them a certain lack of variety, they would comfortably hold quite a large number of dolls.