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As we look at the picture for the first time the quaint costume of the little girl suggests the idea that she is dressed for a tableau. Children the world over love to don the clothes of a past generation and play at men and women. Miss Penelope, we fancy, has been ransacking some old chest of faded finery, and has arrayed herself in the character of "Martha Washington," as painted by Gilbert Stuart. The snowy kerchief folded across her bosom and the big mob cap on her head are precisely like those in the portraits of the colonial lady. The child purses her lips together primly and folds her hands in a demure attitude in her lap, as if to play her part well, but she is far too shy to look us directly in the face, and glances aside with downcast eyes.

All this illusion is dispelled when we come to study the customs of the period. It appears that children then, both in England and America, dressed precisely like their elders, and Penelope's costume here is doubtless such as she wore every day. A little Boston girl, Anna Green Winslow, wrote in her diary in 1771 of wearing a cap and black mitts which we fancy were not unlike these. There are portraits, too, of other little girls of the time, wearing the same huge headdress, as we may see in the family group of the Copleys in the Boston Art Museum.

Penelope was the only child of Sir Brooke Boothby, and, as we may well believe from her winsome face, the darling of the household. Her home was a fine mansion buried among trees in the beautiful English country. She was, we fancy, a quiet little girl, preferring a corner with her dolls to any boisterous romp, but not without a bit of fun in her nature. She was an affectionate little creature, and very fond of her father, watching at the gate for his return home, and sitting on his knee in the evening. On Sunday mornings she went to the quaint old church of Ashbourne and knelt beside her mother in the service.

All this and much more we learn from a book written by her father which bears the pathetic title of "Sorrows." For little Penelope died at the age of seven, and the stricken parent solaced himself in his loneliness by writing the memories of his darling.

The portrait by Reynolds was made when the child was four years old. After her death, Fuseli painted a picture representing her borne to heaven by an angel. There is also a lovely marble monument to Penelope, by Banks, in the Ashbourne church.[3]

[3] See Mrs. Rebecca Harding Davis's article in St. Nicholas, November, 1875, "About the Painter of Little Penelope."