But it was to his father only that he told his secret.

It was a queer secret, and a very real trouble, too, I can tell
you.

Part of it was that Master Sunshine was just the least bit bow-
legged.

Of course there could not be much of a secret about that. Lots of
people knew it quite well. In fact, if you looked carefully at the
well-shaped limbs in the trim blue stockings and neat knicker-
bockers, you could easily see that the legs curved slightly
outwards.

But the real secret--the real heart and soul of the matter--was
that being bow-legged was a great, great grief to Master Sunshine.
No one but his father ever knew this--not even his mother, or
Almira Jane, or Lucy. It was too sore a subject to speak of
freely.

It was on the day when he first put on trousers that his troubles
began. It seemed to him that people began then to make such odd
remarks about him; and the strangest thing of all was that they
would seem to quite forget that he heard every word they said, and
that they never seemed to understand how they were hurting his
feelings.

For a time he solved the difficulty in a clever way. He begged his
mother to make him some loose sailor suits with long bagging legs.