Sophie May

excerpt: Dotty Dimple, after a night of pleasant sleep, greeted herself in the morning with a groan. It was as if she had said,— 'O, dear! you here again, Dotty? Why didn't you sleep longer?' Prudy noticed the cloud on her sister's face in a moment; she saw she had 'waked up wrong.' Now I have never told you how peculiarly trying it was to live with Dotty Dimple. She seemed to have, at the same time, the nature of a lion and a lamb. When the...

Excerpt: One beautiful morning in October the sun came up rejoicing. Dotty Dimple watched it from the window with feelings of peculiar pleasure. 'I should think that old sun would wear out and grow rough round the edges. Why not? Last week it was ever so dull; now it is bright. I shouldn't wonder if the angels up there have to scour it once in a while.' You perceive that Dotty's ideas of astronomy were anything but correct. She supposed the solar...

Excerpt from Little Prudy: "I am going to tell you something about a little girl who was always saying and doing funny things, and very often getting into trouble. Her name was Prudy Parlin, and she and her sister Susy, three years older, lived in Portland, in the State of Maine, though every summer they went to Willowbrook, to Visit their grandmother..."

Rebecca Sophia Clarke (1833-1906) was an American author of children's fiction. She wrote under the penname Sophie May and had 45 published works between 1860 and 1903. The most successful were the Little Prudy characters which made their first appearance in short stories for the children's periodicals, The Little Pilgrim and the Congregationalist. The series was later published into books. Her sister Sarah Jones Clarke (1840-1929) was also an author...

Excerpt from Little Prudy's Captain Horace: "One fine evening in May, brown-eyed Horace and blue-eyed Grace stood on the balcony, leaning against the iron railing, watching the stars, and chatting together..."