Pixie O'Shaughnessy   By: George de Horne Vaizey (1857-1917)

by Mrs George de Horne Vaizey This is an absolutely delightful book. Pixie is a totally unique character! Her mother had died and had left what money she had for Pixie's education. The family live in a tumble down old castle in Ireland, and are all and each totally eccentric, in an Irish kind of way. Pixies and her father travel to London, for she is to go to a school for girls in the London suburbs. Suddenly her father realises what a shabby little thing she is. Furthermore she has a very strong Irish brogue. So how does she get on with the other girls. Famously, in the end, but there were a few set backs.

There is a very strongly written episode in the second half of the book, where Pixie takes the blame for the loss of a perfume bottle that had been given to one of the mistresses by an old and beloved friend. Everything points to Pixie being the culprit. She actually knows who did it, but somehow had given her word that she wouldn't give the other girl away. Pixie is punished severely, not only for having done the deed, as generally assumed, but also for refusing to talk about it. Could any of us show such strength of character? There are several sequels to this book, but though good, they are mere sequels. The inspiration that went into this book is unsurpassable. N.H. PIXIE O'SHAUGHNESSY

BY MRS GEORGE DE HORNE VAIZEY

CHAPTER ONE.

THE UGLY DUCKLING.

Pixie O'Shaughnessy was at once the joy and terror of the school. It had been a quiet, well conducted seminary before her time, or it seemed so, at least, looking back after the arrival of the wild Irish tornado, before whose pranks the mild mischief of the Englishers was as water unto wine. Pixie was entered in the school lists as "Patricia Monica de Vere O'Shaughnessy," but no one ever addressed her by such a title, not even her home people, by whom the name was considered at once as a tragedy and a joke of the purest water.

Mrs O'Shaughnessy had held stern ideas about fanciful names for her children, on which subject she had often waxed eloquent to her friends.

"What," she would ask, "could be more trying to a large and bouncing young woman than to find herself saddled for life with the title of `Ivy,' or for a poor anaemic creature to pose as `Ruby' before a derisive world?" She christened her own first daughter Bridget, and the second Joan, and the three boys respectively Jack, Miles, and Patrick, resolutely waving aside suggestions of more poetic names even when they touched her fancy, or appealed to her imagination. Better err on the safe side, and safeguard oneself from the risk of having a brood of plain, awkward children masquerading through life under names which made them a laughing stock to their companions.