Ever since Mary Ann Snow was a wee baby her eyes were so big
and twinkly, that her father called her "Twinkle" and so did everyone
else. When she was eight years old she was a pretty little girl with soft brown
hair and pink cheeks. Her feet were dancing feet and her hands were clapping
hands whenever she was happy. She lived in a nice white and green house in the country
with her father, her mother and her Grannie. She should have been a happy child
most of the time but I am sorry to say that sometimes she was sad indeed. Why was
she sad, you ask? Well, because she had no brothers or sisters and there were
no children nearby.
There were many pets: Rufus the big white cat; Blackie the
little black dog; Chee-Chee, the yellow singing canary bird; and Do-Re-Me, the
three gold fish in the bowl on the window seat near Daddy's favorite chair.
These were Twinkle's very own pets and she loved them dearly. She would talk to
them and they would talk back to her in their own special way.
Then there were birds in the trees outside; hens and baby
chicks in the hen yard; there were ducks and ducklings in the pond; cows in the
pastures, some with tinkling bells around their necks; there were horses in the
barn that loved to lick sugar off of Twinkle' s hand and would sometimes take
her riding; sometimes garter snakes slithered past Twinkle in the tall grass
and Twinkle loved them all , second best to her in-doors pets. She counted them
all as her friends, yet they belonged to the animal kingdom and Twinkle was
lonely for children, belonging to the human kingdom like herself and Mother and
Daddy and Grannie and Katy who worked in the kitchen and Tom and Ken who worked
in the fields. So each evening Twinkle would pray for a brother or sister and
then she would fall asleep and dream about them.
