PREFACE

"What ever became of Polluy Pepper's famous Chicken Pie, and also Phronsie's red-topped shoes?" the friends of the "Five Little Peppers" keep asking. "We have searched through all the Pepper Books, and cannot find them. Please give us those two stories again."

At last all these requests are granted in this book, containing, first of all, those two stories that make the very beginning of all the records of the Pepper Family. 'Indeed, there wasn't any Pepper Family before they were written; nor any Little Brown House, not a sign of one; nor any Badgertown even, till Margaret Sidney one day wrote "Polly Pepper's Chicken Pie" and sent it to the Wide Awake Magazine.

And no one could be more astonished than was she—for the record was so simple—when the editor wrote for another one just like it. So "Phronsie Pepper's New Shoes" was written.

And then—well, the editor wrote that the Wide Awake must have enough stories for one year, to be connected. So Margaret Sidney had to go regularly after that to the "Little Brown House" and write down all the records just as Mrs. Pepper and the Five Little Peppers told them to her, and then those insatiable editors wrote that they must have a book— nothing more nor less —because the children's letters to them from all over the country demanded it. So that was the way it all began. And of course the two separate stories—the motif, as it were, for the book—had to be left out.

So here they are now in the post of honor—leading off in the very front of the volume, as is quite proper; the other stories (which are all just newly written expressly for this book) following humbly after in the wake of Phronsie's red-topped shoes.

-Margaret Sidney

From the book