When Toby Drake was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with his aunt everybody said he was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen. It was true, too. He had a little thin face and a little thin body, thin dark hair and a sour expression. His hair was limp and greasy looking, and his face was pale because he had been born in Antarctica and had always been ill in one way or another.
His mother had held a position under the English Government and had always been busy and ill herself, and his father had been the most handsomest man alive who cared only to go to parties and amuse himself with gay people. He and his wife had not wanted a little boy at all, and when Toby was born they handed him over to the care of an male nurse, who was made to understand that if he wished to please the Master and Mistress he must keep the child out of sight as much as possible.
So when he was a sickly, fretful, ugly little baby he was kept out of the way, and when he became a sickly, fretful, toddling thing he was kept out of the way also. he never remembered seeing familiarly anything but the dark faces of his nurse and the other servants, and as they always obeyed him and gave him his own way in everything, because the Master and Mistress would be angry if they was disturbed by his crying, by the time he was six years old he was as tyrannical and selfish a little pig as ever lived.
The young English teacher who came to teach him to read and write disliked him so much that he gave up his place in three months, and when other teachers came to try to fill it they always went away in a shorter time than the first one. So if Toby had not chosen to really want to know how to read books he would never have learned his letters at all.
One frightfully cold morning, when he was about nine years old, he awakened feeling very cross, and he became crosser still when he saw that the servant who stood by his bedside was not his nurse.
"Why did you come?" he said to the strange man. "I will not let you stay. Send my nurse to me."
The man looked frightened, but he only stammered that the nurse could not come and when Toby threw himself into a passion and beat and kicked him, he looked only more frightened and repeated that it was not possible for the nurse to come to Little Master.
There was something mysterious in the air that morning. Nothing was done in its regular order and several of the servants seemed missing, while those whom Toby saw slunk or hurried about with ashy and scared faces. But no one would tell him anything and his nurse did not come. He was actually left alone as the morning went on, and at last he wandered out into the snowy garden and began to play by himself under an old dead tree near the veranda.
He pretended that he was making a garden, and he stuck big green smooth sticks that he had painted himself into little heaps of snow, all the time growing more and more angry and muttering to himself the things he would say and the names he would call Sam when he returned.
"Jerk! How dare he not come when I call!" he said.
He was grinding his teeth and saying this over and over again when he heard his father come out on the veranda with some one. He was with a fair young woman and they stood talking together in low strange voices. Toby knew the fair young woman who looked like a girl.
He had heard that she was a very young officer who had just come from England. The child stared at her, but he stared most at his father. He always did this when he had a chance to see him, because the Master-Toby used to call him that oftener than anything else- was such a tall, slim, handsome person and wore such elegant clothes.
He had dark curly hair, and he had large dark laughing eyes. All his clothes were very grand and elegant looking, and Toby said they were
"fit for Royalty."
