Explore "A Live Dummy" by Mary Louisa Molesworth on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The Merediths were spending the autumn on the French coast, at a sea-bathing place called Sablons-sur-mer. It is a nice bright little place. I am afraid the inhabitants would be offended if they heard it called "little," for they think it a very important town! It consists of two long streets -- one facing the sea, one inland, where the shops and the houses of the people who live there all the year round, are. And between these two streets run smaller ones -- so small that they are more passage-ways than streets. The most imposing one is called an "arcade"; in it are the best shops, a bazaar of all sorts of fancy things to delight children's eyes, from tin buckets and spades to dig with in the sands, to rocking-horses, though not of a very expensive kind. At one corner of this arcade is a large, ready-made tailor's establishment; this shop, for reasons I will explain to you, divided the children's attention with the bazaar.
There were ever so many Merediths; three girls and two boys and a couple of cousins. The Sablons people are accustomed to English visitors, so the sight of this band of children was not startling to them; and the little _messieurs_, and the _jeunes mees_, soon had several friends in the place, whom they never passed without a friendly nod and a _bon jour_ or _bon soir_, as the case might be.