Books with author Mrs. Mary Louisa Molesworth

Once upon a time—a fairly long ago time—there lived in a neat little cottage two young girls who were sisters. If you had gone to see them on a bright warm summer's day, I daresay you would have envied them and their life and their lot. For they were pretty and healthy and they loved each other dearly, and the cottage was charming to look at, in its dress of clustering roses and honeysuckle and traveller's joy, and other sweet and beautiful climbing, flowering plants. Furthermore, it stood in a little garden filled with treasures of different kinds, pansies, of which there was a great variety, and lilies and mignonette and all the flowers one loves to see in an old-fashioned garden of the kind. And the sisters kept it in perfect order, the beds were always raked, there was never a weed to be seen, the tiny plots of grass were like velvet.

"Where did you get those eyes so blue?" "Out of the sky as I came through." Christmas week a good many years ago. Not an "old-fashioned" Christmas this year, for there was no snow or ice; the sky was clear and the air pure, but yet without the sharp, bracing clearness and purity that Master Jack Frost brings when he comes to see us in one of his nice, bright, sunny humours. For he has humours as well as other people—not only is he fickle in the extreme, but even black sometimes, and he is then, I can assure you, a most disagreeable visitor. But this Christmas time he had taken it into his head not to come at all, and the world looked rather reproachful and disconcerted. The poor, bare December world—it misses its snow garment, so graciously hiding all imperfections revealed by the absence of green grass and fluttering leaves; it misses, too, its winter jewels of icicles and hoar frost. Poor old world! What a great many Decembers you have jogged through; no wonder you begin to feel that you need a little dressing up and adorning, like a beauty no longer as young as she has been.

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At Number 9 Market Square Place—that was the name of the short row of houses I have described—some six months or so before the date at which I think this story may really be said to begin, there had been an arrival one evening. It was late October: the days were drawing in; it was almost dark when the fly from the two-miles-off railway station—I should have explained that there was no station at Thetford; the inhabitants had petitioned against the railway coming near them, and now their children had to suffer the inconvenience of this shortsightedness as best they might—drew up at Miss Mildmay's door, and out of it stepped four people—three children, and a young man scarcely more than a boy.

CONTENTS: NIGHT AND MORNING APPLES AND NUTS IT IS HILDEGARDE ON THE WAY 'WHAT'S O'CLOCK?' GNOMELAND A COLLATION UNDER DIFFICULTIES TREE-TOP LAND A CONCERT THE BLUE-SILK ROOM ‘THE UNSELFISH MERMAID’ With these words the spinning-wheel fairy's voice ceased, but Hildegarde and Leonore did not move or speak for some moments. Then they raised their heads and gazed at their kind friend. 'Oh, thank you, thank you,' they said, 'for the story and the pictures; we couldn't look up at first, for we saw something more than you had told us. Almost the loveliest pictures of all came at the end.' 'There was one,' said Hildegarde, 'of the baby running to her mother in the garden, and the little brother came too, and they knew her again in a moment, though she had been so long away--oh, it was beautiful!' 'And,' added Leonore, 'the last of all nearly made me cry. The baby had grown quite big and was standing near the water's edge. Emerald had been singing to her, and just for one moment we saw her face--so sad, but so sweet. Oh, how I should love to have a mermaid friend.' But even as she spoke, her voice grew drowsy. She knew the spinning-wheel fairy was smiling at her and Hildegarde, and they both felt her gently releasing the rainbow thread from their fingers, but after that they knew no more, till a sound of tapping woke them up.