Little Sunshine's holiday

by Dinah Maria Mulock Craik

Fortunately, she was engrossed by her pear, which took a long time to eat. First, it had to be pared,—in long parings, which twisted and dangled like Sunshine’s curls. Then these parings had to be thrown out of the window to the little birds, which were seen sitting here and there on the telegraph wires. Lastly, the pear had to be eaten slowly and deliberately. She fed mamma, herself, and Lizzie, too, turn and turn about, in the most conscientious way; uttering at each mouthful that ringing laugh which I wish I could put into paper and print; but I can’t. By the time all was done, Sunshine had grown sleepy. She cuddled down in her mamma’s arms, with a whispered request for “Maymie’s apron.”

Now here a confession must be made. The one consolation of life to this little person is the flannel apron upon which her first nurse used to wash her when she was a baby. She takes the two corners of it to stroke her face with one hand, while she sucks the thumb of the other,—and so she lies, meditating with open eyes, till at last she goes to sleep. She is never allowed to have the apron in public, so to-day her mamma was obliged to invent a little “Maymie’s apron”—a small square of flannel—to comfort her on the long railway journey. This being produced, though she was a little ashamed, and blushed in her pretty childish way, she turned her back on the gentlemen in the carriage and settled down in deep content, her eyes fixed on mamma’s face. Gradually they closed—and the lively little woman lay fast asleep, warm and heavy, in her mamma’s arms.

There she might have slept till the journey’s end, but for those horrid gentlemen, who began to quarrel so fiercely about French and Prussians, and which had the right of it in this terrible war,—a question which you little folks even when you are great big folks fifty years hence may hardly be able to decide,—that they disturbed the poor child in her happy sleep, and at last she started up, looking round her with frightened eyes, and began to scream violently. She had been so good all the way, so little trouble to anybody, that mamma could not help thinking it served the gentlemen right, and told them, severely, that “if gentlemen did differ, they need not do it so angrily as to waken a child.” At which they all looked rather ashamed, and were quiet for the rest of the journey.

It did not last much longer; and again the little girl had the fun of jumping out of a puff-puff and into a carriage. The bright day closed; it was already dusk, and pouring rain, and they had to drive a long way, stop at several places, and see several new people whom Little Sunshine had never seen before. She was getting tired and hungry, but still kept good and did not cry; and when at last she came to the cottage which her mamma had told her about, where lived an old gentleman and lady who had been very kind to mamma, and dear grandmamma, too, for many years, and would be very kind to the little girl, Sunny ran in at once, as merry as possible.

After awhile mamma followed, and lo! there was Little Sunshine, quite at home already, sitting in the middle of the white sheep-skin hearth-rug, having taken half her “things” off, chattering in the most friendly manner, and asking to be lifted up to see “a dear little baby and a mamma,” which was a portrait of the old lady’s eldest sister as an infant in her mother’s arms, about seventy years ago.

And what do you think happened next? Sunny actually sat up to supper, which she had never done in all her life before,—supper by candle-light: a mouthful of fowl, and a good many mouthfuls of delicious cream, poured, with a tiny bit of jam in the middle of it, into her saucer. And she made a large piece of dry toast into “fishes,” and swam them in her mamma’s tea, and then fished them out with a teaspoon, and ate them up. Altogether it was a wonderful meal and left her almost too wide awake to go to bed, if she had not had the delight of sleeping in her mamma’s room instead of a nursery, and being bathed, instead of in her own proper bath, in a washing-tub!

This washing-tub was charming. She eyed it doubtfully, she walked around it, she peered over it; at last she slowly got into it.

“Come and see me in my bath; come and see Sunny in her bath,” cried she, inviting all the family, half of whom accepted the invitation. Mamma heard such shouts of laughing, with her little girl’s laugh clearer than all, that she was obliged to go up-stairs to see what was the matter. There was Sunshine frolicking about and splashing like a large fish in the tub, the maids and mistresses standing round, exceedingly amused at their new plaything, the little “water baby.”

But at last the day’s excitement was over, and Sunny lay in her white nightgown, cuddled up like a round ball in her mamma’s lap, sucking her Maymie’s apron, and listening to the adventures of Tommy Tinker. Tommy Tinker is a young gentleman about whom a story, “a quite new story, which Sunny never heard before,” has to be told every night. Mamma had done this for two months, till Tommy, his donkey, his father, John Tinker, who went about the country crying “Pots and kettles to mend,” his schoolfellow, Jack, and his playfellow, Mary, were familiar characters, and had gone through so much that mamma was often puzzled as to what should happen to them next; this night especially, when she herself was rather tired, but fortunately the little girl grew sleepy very soon.

So she said her short prayers, ending with “God make Sunny a good little girl” (to which she sometimes deprecatingly adds, “but Sunny is a good girl”), curled down in the beautiful large strange bed,—such a change from her little crib at home,—and was fast asleep in no time.