Sun-Babies

Sun-Babies: Studies in the Child-life of India by Cornelia Sorabji

My fastest real baby friend was a Moon-baby. He was English, he was adorable, and I began to know him very soon after the fairies brought him dancing to the Earth on a silver-blue Moon-ray.

A little pensive in repose, his dear face was, when he smiled, the gladness of a spring meadow of golden cowslips.

In my heart I treasure many memories. . . . Geoffrey coming in from his walk with a half-eaten ginger nut which he had saved for his friend: "I brang it all the way for you"; or Geoffrey with a crushed dandelion in a hot little fist, another offering; Geoffrey listening to nursery tales; Geoffrey adoring his mother, like whom, for him, to the end of his days, no one ever existed, or could exist; Geoffrey at five years of age, when on a rare occasion I had to leave the house without bidding him good-bye. That was a beloved nursery memory. When told that I had gone, he would not at first believe. "She did not tell me," he kept insisting. But belief followed on fruitless search, and then: "Come upstars, Nannie," said he to his nurse; and, when up in the nursery, old Nannie was made to cut off a gold-brown curl to wrap away in silver paper against my return.