Sunbonneted

While he is at the front end selling calico to some wearisome old lady, sunbonneted and chaffering, a mischievous boy is very apt to be pocketing lumps of sugar for profit, or starting the faucet of a molasses barrel for fun at the other.

Standing expectantly on this porch were two fashionably dressed little tots of girls — cut very much on the same pattern, like paper dolls — and a sunbonneted, gingham-clad young woman whose rounded arm lightly held a heavy but spick and span baby, a regular prize winner for plumpness and fairness, a baby of such well-poised deportment that every noddle was kingly.

And there was about her, small and ginghamed and sunbonneted as she was, a certain reserve and dignity and fineness that they resented.

Among them was the “Madonna of the Prairie”—an angelic, idealistic, sunbonneted Euro-American woman, who went west with her family and aided in the Turnerian process of subduing the wilderness.