So poor Sunshine crept solemnly into a large press with sliding doors, used for hanging up clothes, and there remained in silence and darkness all the while her mamma was dressing to go out. At last she put her head through the opening.
“Sunny quite good now, mamma.”
“Very well,” said mamma, keeping with difficulty a grave countenance. “But will Sunny promise never to kick Austin Thomas again?”
“Yes.”
“Then she may come out of the cupboard, and kiss mamma.”
Which she did, with a beaming face, as if nothing at all had happened. But she did not forget her naughtiness. Some days after, she came up, and confidentially informed her mamma, as if it were an act of great virtue, “Mamma, Sunny ’membered her promise. Sunny hasn’t kicked the little boy again.”
After the eight o’clock breakfast, Sunny, her mamma, and the five little boys generally took a walk together, or sat telling stories in front of the house, till the ten o’clock breakfast of the elders. That over, the party dispersed their several ways, wandering about by land or water, and meeting occasionally, great folks and small, in boats, or by hillsides, or indoors at the children’s one o’clock dinner,—almost the only time, till night, that anybody ever was indoors.
Besides most beautiful walks for the elders, there were, close by the house, endless play-places for the children, each more attractive than the other. The pier on the loch was the great delight; but there was, about a hundred yards from the house, a burn (in fact, burns were always tumbling from the hillside, wherever you went), with a tiny bridge across it, which was a charming spot for little people. There usually assembled a whole parliament of ducks, and hens, and chickens, quacking and clucking and gobbling together, to their own great content and that of the children, especially the younger ones. Thither came Austin Thomas with his nurse Grissel, a thorough Scotch lassie; and Sunny with her English Lizzie; and there the baby, the pet of all, tiny “Miss Mary,” a soft, dainty, cuddling thing of six months old, used to be brought to lie and sleep in the sunshine, watched by Little Sunshine with never-ending interest. She would go anywhere with “the dear little baby.” The very intonation of her voice, and the expression of her eyes, changed as she looked at it,—for this little girl is passionately fond of babies.
Farther down the mountain-road was another attractive corner, a stone dike, covered with innumerable blackberries. Though gathered daily, there were each morning more to gather, and they furnished an endless feast for both nurses and children. And really, in this sharp mountain air, the hungriness of both big and little people must have been alarming. How the house-mother ever fed her household, with the only butcher’s shop ten miles off, was miraculous. For very often the usual resort of shooting-lodges entirely failed; the game was scarce, and hardly worth shooting, and in this weather the salmon absolutely refused to be caught. Now and then a mournful-looking sheep was led up to the door, and offered for sale alive, to be consumed gradually as mutton. But when you have to eat an animal right through, you generally get a little tired of him at last.
The food that never failed, and nobody ever wearied of, was the trout; large dishes of which appeared, and disappeared, every morning at breakfast. A patient guest, who could not go shooting, used to sit fishing for trout, hour by hour, in the cheerfullest manner; thankful for small blessings (of a pound or a pound and a half at most), and always hoping for the big salmon which he had travelled three hundred miles to fish for, but which never came. Each day, poor gentleman! he watched the dazzlingly bright sky, and, catching the merest shadow of a cloud, would say courageously, “It looks like rain! Perhaps the salmon may bite to-morrow.”