Rachel and the Seven Wonders

Rachel was a very unhappy little girl as she sat in an omnibus with Miss Moore, on her way to the British Museum. She didn’t want to go to the British Museum. She didn’t want to be in London at all. She longed desperately to be back in her country home with her father and mother—now, alas! far away in Egypt.

Everything as Rachel said had happened so suddenly. Certainly her mother had been ill some time, but it was all at once decided that the only possible place to send her little daughter in a hurry, was to Aunt Hester, in London.

Aunt Hester, who was her father’s eldest sister, and in the eyes of Rachel, at least, awfully old, was quite kind, but also, as she admitted, quite unused to children. The first thing she did therefore, was to engage a governess to look after her niece for the seven weeks she would have to remain with her.

Miss Moore, a rather uninteresting, middle-aged lady, had duly arrived the previous evening, and at breakfast time Aunt Hester had suggested the British Museum as a suitable place to which Rachel might be conducted.

“She’s never been to London before, and, though I don’t want her to sit too long over lessons, I think she should improve her mind while she is here. The British Museum is an education in itself,” declared Aunt Hester, and Miss Moore had primly agreed.

So it happened that at eleven o’clock on a bright spring morning, a secretly unwilling little girl climbed the steps leading to the great entrance of the great museum. The pigeons on the steps reminded her of the dovecote at home, and the tears came suddenly to her eyes, as almost without thinking she counted the number of birds on the top step.