Little Sunshine's Holiday: A Picture From Life
9781465682758
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
While writing this title, I paused, considering whether the little girl to whom it refers would not say of it, as she sometimes does of other things, “You make a mistake.” For she is such a very accurate little person. She cannot bear the slightest alteration of a fact. In herself and in other people she must have the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. For instance, one day, overhearing her mamma say, “I had my shawl with me,” she whispered, “No, mamma, not your shawl; it was your waterproof.” Therefore, I am sure she would wish me to explain at once that “Little Sunshine” is not her real name, but a pet name, given because she is such a sunshiny child; and that her “holiday” was not so much hers—seeing she was then not three years old, and every day was a holiday—as her papa’s and mamma’s, who are very busy people, and who took her with them on one of their rare absences from home. They felt they could not do without her merry laugh, her little pattering feet, and her pretty curls,—even for a month. And so she got a “holiday” too, though it was quite unearned: as she has never been to school, and her education has gone no farther than a crooked S, a round O, an M for mamma, and a D for—but this is telling. Of course Little Sunshine has a Christian name and surname, like other little girls, but I do not choose to give them. She has neither brother nor sister, and says “she doesn’t want any,—she had rather play with papa and mamma.” She is not exactly a pretty child, but she has very pretty yellow curls, and is rather proud of “my curls.” She has only lately begun to say “I” and “my,” generally speaking of herself, baby-fashion, in the third person,—as “Sunny likes that,” “Sunny did so-and-so,” etc. She always tells everything she has done, and everything she is going to do. If she has come to any trouble—broken a teacup, for instance—and her mamma says, “Oh, I am so sorry! Who did that?” Little Sunshine will creep up, hanging her head and blushing, “Sunny did it; she won’t ever do it again.” But the idea of denying it would never come into her little head. Everybody has always told the exact truth to her, and so she tells the truth to everybody, and has no notion of there being such a thing as falsehood in the world.
