"Little Miss Weezy" by Penn Shirley is a children's novel written in the late 19th century. It follows the high-spirited toddler Louise “Weezy” Rowe through a string of domestic adventures with her family and neighbors, blending humor with gentle moral lessons. The vignettes spotlight Weezy’s mischief and charm alongside the foibles and growth of her siblings, parents, and kindly Uncle Doctor, with affectionate attention to everyday life and the virtues of honesty,
obedience, and kindness. Readers who enjoy warm family stories and lively child viewpoints will find it playful and tender. The opening of the story introduces Weezy’s nickname and home circle, then sweeps through a series of comic scrapes: she locks the maid out while the wash boils over, disrupts church by serenading the hymn with “Little Sally Walker,” and later follows a beggar child and gets lost before a policeman and the girl help her home. She and a helper, Ellen, trigger a memorable moment when a pickle turns up in the teapot at a minister’s dinner; she climbs a clock to steal the desk key and cuts paper dolls from a deed; she suffers the mumps while braiding her uncle’s beard; and she inadvertently sends her father down the street with her yarn doll “Sambo” tied to his coat. Weezy “goes calling” with visiting-cards, returns in a delivery wagon with figs, and is wrongly suspected of taking a dime until it’s found. A parallel thread shows brother Kirke’s lapse and honest confession at school, while Weezy’s own judgment shines when she refuses a birthday drive until a “stealing apples” joke is cleared up. A winter visit to grandparents adds a schoolroom mix-up—promising “one slide” but “heeling and toeing” the snowy bank instead—before her father arrives to bring her home for Christmas, with a mysterious moving, musical present teased as the scene breaks. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
Mary Meehan and The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
Reading Level
Reading ease score: 82.8 (6th grade). Easy to read.
