PREFACE¹

I often run down to Badgertown and into the little brown house to talk things over with the Peppers,
and every single time they one and all tell me they don’t think I have told enough about David.
It quite cut me to the heart the other day to hear Polly say mournfully, “You’ve made a book about
Ben and one about Phronsie, and you’ve told all about Joel’s Adventures, and stories that I made up;
and you never let Davie have a book—and he is our Davie.”
“Oh, I will, Polly — I will!” I promised. And she laughed gleefully, and Ben smiled in great
satisfaction, and Joel said: “Whickets! Now, Dave, you’re going to have a book all to yourself.” And
Phronsie crowed and gurgled, and made a cheese right in the middle of the old kitchen floor. As for
Mother Pepper, the look she gave me, well—wasn’t I glad that I had promised!
But David ran up to me and whispered, “I’d rather you made another book about Joel.”
“I can’t, Davie,” I whispered back, “the children all over the country have been teasing² me for years
to give them a book about you. And now as all the rest of the Pepper family want it, why, you see, I
just must write it.”
“O dear!” said David.
Polly ran over to our corner. “Dear Margaret Sidney,” she begged, clasping³ her hands, “please tell all
about Davie when he was a little boy. That’s what we want; because you see you told ever so much
more about the rest of us than you did about him. And Davie was always just splendid! Why, he was
our Davie!”
So now here is “Our Davie Pepper,” just as the Little Brown House people wanted me to write it.
Margaret Sidney.
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