“I’m looking at the great big globe, that Uncle Joe said I might touch,” said Lucy.  “Here are all the names just like my lesson-book at home:  Europe, Africa, and America.”

“Why, bless the child! where else should they be?  There are all them oceans and seas besides that I’ve crossed over, many’s the time, with poor Ben Bunker, who was last seen off Cape Hatteras.”

“What, all these great green places, with Atlantic and Pacific on them; you don’t really mean that you’ve sailed over them!  I should like to make an ant do it on a sunflower seed!  How could you, Mother Bunch?  You are not small enough.”

“Ho! ho!” said the housekeeper, laughing; “does the child think I sailed on that very globe there?”

“I know one learns names,” said Lucy; “but is it real?”

“Real!  Why, Missie, don’t you see it’s a sort of a picture?  There’s your photograph now, it’s not as big as you, but it shows you; and so a chart, or a map, or a globe, is just a picture of the shapes of the coast-line of the land and the sea, and the rivers in them, and mountains, and the like.  Look here!” And she made Lucy stand on a chair and look at a map of her own town that was hanging against the wall, showing her all the chief buildings, the churches, streets, the town hall, and at last helping her find her own Papa’s house.

When Lucy had traced all the corners she had to turn in going from home to Uncle Joe’s, and had even found little frizzles for the five maple trees before the Parsonage, she understood that the map was a small picture of the situation of the buildings in the town, and thought she could find her way to some new place if she studied it well.

Then Mrs. Bunker showed her a big map of the whole country, and there Lucy found the river, and the roads, and the names of the villages near, as she had seen or heard of them; and she began to understand that a map or globe really brought distant places into an exceedingly small picture, and that where she saw a name and a spot she was to think of houses and churches; that a branching black line was a flowing river full of water; a curve in, a pretty bay shut in with rocks and hills; a point jutting out, generally a steep rock with a lighthouse on it.

“And all these places are countries, Bunchey, are they, with fields and houses like ours?”

“Houses, yes, and fields, but not always like ours, Miss Lucy.”

“And are there little children, boys and girls, in them all?”

“To be sure there are, else how would the world go on?  Why, I’ve seen them by swarms, white or brown or black, running down to the shore as soon as the vessel cast anchor; and whatever color they were, you might be sure of two things, Miss Lucy, in which they were all alike.”

“Oh, what, Mrs. Bunker?”

“Why, in making plenty of noise, and in wanting all they could get to eat.  But they were little darlings, some of them, if I only could have got at them to make them a bit cleaner.  Some of them looked for all the world like the little bronze images your Uncle has got in the museum, which he brought from Italy, and they hadn’t a rag more clothing on either.  They were in India.  Dear, dear, to see them tumble about in the surf!”