



Produced by Jeff Kaylin, Bruce Albrecht, and Andrew Sly.




[Illustration: That is where we play--I mean it is most pleasant there]


  The
  Very Small Person

By

Annie Hamilton Donnell

Author of "Rebecca Mary"

Illustrated by Elizabeth Shippen Green

New York and London

Harper & Brothers Publishers

MCMVI



Contents

     I.  Little Blue Overalls
    II.  The Boy
   III.  The Adopted
    IV.  Bobby Unwelcome
     V.  The Little Girl Who Should Have Been a Boy
    VI.  The Lie
   VII.  The Princess of Make-Believe
  VIII.  The Promise
    IX.  The Little Lover
     X.  The Child
    XI.  The Recompense


Illustrations

  That is where we play--I mean it is most pleasant there
  Little Blue Overalls climbed into a chair
  'Fore I'd lean my chin on folks's gates and watch 'em!
  She stayed there a week--a month--a year
  It was worse than creepy, creaky noises
  I can't play... I'm being good
  Murray had... seen the vision, too
  Elizabeth




Chapter I

Little Blue Overalls


Miss Salome's face was gently frowning as she wrote.

"Dear John," the letter began,--"It's all very well except one thing.
I wonder you didn't think of that. _I'm_ thinking of it most
of the time, and it takes away so much of the pleasure of the
rose-garden and the raspberry-bushes! Anne is in raptures over the
raspberry-bushes.

"Yes, the raspberries and the roses are all right. And I like the
stone-wall with the woodbine over it. (Good boy, you remembered that,
didn't you?) And the apple-tree and the horse-chestnut and the
elm--of course I like them.

"The house is just big enough and just small enough, and there's a
trunk-closet, as I stipulated. And Anne's room has a'southern
exposure'--Anne's crazy spot is southern exposures. Mine's _it_.
Dear, dear, John, how could you forget _it!_ That everything
else--closets and stone-walls and exposures--should be to my mind but
_that!_ Well, I am thinking of moving out, before I move in. But I
haven't told Anne. Anne is the kind of person _not_ to tell, until
the last moment. It saves one's nerves--heigh-ho! I thought I was
coming here to get away from nerves! I was so satisfied. I really
meant to thank you, John, until I discovered--it. Oh yes, I
know--Elizabeth is looking over your shoulder, and you two are saying
something that is unfit for publication about old maids! My children,
then thank the Lord you aren't either of you old maids. Make the most
of it."

Miss Salome let her pen slip to the bare floor and gazed before her
wistfully. The room was in the dreary early stages of unpacking, but
it was not of that Miss Salome was thinking. Her eyes were gazing out
of the window at a thin gray trail of smoke against the blue ground
of the sky. She could see the little house, too, brown and tiny and a
little battered. She could see the clothes-line, and count easily
enough the pairs of little stockings on it. She caught up the pen
again fiercely.

"There are eight," she wrote. "Allowing two legs to a child, doesn't
that make _four?_ John Dearborn, you have bought me a house next
door to four children! I think I shall begin to put the books back
to-night. As ill luck will have it, they are all unpacked.

"I have said nothing to Anne; Anne has said nothing to me. But we
both know. She has counted the stockings too. We are both old maids.
No, I have not _seen_ them yet--anything but their stockings on the
clothes-line. But the mother is not a washer-woman--there is no hope.
I don't know how I know she isn't a washer-woman, but I do. It is
impressed upon me. So there are four children, to say nothing of the
Lord knows how many babies still in socks! I cannot forgive you,
John."

Miss Salome had been abroad for many years. Stricken suddenly with
homesickness, she and her ancient serving-woman, Anne, had fled
across seas to their native land. Miss Salome had first commissioned
John, long-suffering John,--