Madame Bonnet’s shop was so small that if you hadn’t known it was there you might easily have walked past it and never seen it at all.
It was one story high, with a low front door, and panes of glass in the one window so tiny that it was difficult to see the wares that Madame Bonnet had for sale. But if you shut one eye and pressed the other close to the glass, you were well repaid for your trouble, for Madame Bonnet kept a toy shop the like of which was not to be found anywhere, though you traveled the world over in search of it.
It was not that the shop was large, because it wasn’t. It was not that Madame Bonnet had many toys for sale, because she hadn’t. But the children said you could buy at Madame Bonnet’s what you couldn’t buy anywhere else. And though the grown people sometimes stated, and perhaps truly, that Madame Bonnet hadn’t bought a penny’s worth of new stock in twenty-five years, the children were well satisfied, and no doubt that is the true test of a toy shop, after all.
“Oh, Phil,” cried Susan, pressing one eye against the window, “do look at the china doll carriage, and the little doll’s lamp with a pink shade and all, and that beautiful pair of vases that would just go on the mantel in my doll’s house. I mean if I had a doll’s house,” added Susan truthfully.
But Phil, twisting and turning and almost standing on his head, was calling out:
“Look at the china boy rowing in the boat—with all his bundles, too. What do you think is in them, Susan? Do tell me. What is in that yellow striped bundle? What do you think is in that one?”
“Something for him to eat, I guess,” said Susan sensibly. “Let’s go inside and look around.”
Madame Bonnet was comfortably knitting in the rear of the shop, and didn’t think of getting up to wait upon her customers.
“Well, Susan Whiting,” said she, gazing at the children over her spectacles. “How do you do? Is your grandmother well? And so your grandfather is going to call by for you. I suppose he came in to the Court-House on business. And this is the little boy who has come to live next door to you, is it? Well, my dears, I hope you will find something you like here. Just walk around, and if you want to know about anything bring it to me. My knee has been so bad with rheumatism that I don’t get up if I can help it.”
And Madame Bonnet returned to her knitting, apparently forgetting the children, who walked about on tiptoe eyeing the toys and handling everything within reach.