A rich little girl called Sunshine runs away from her own birthday party into the back courts of the city and is taken in by an Irish washerwoman and her son Teddy — until an organ-grinder carries her off to dance for pennies, a railway accident separates everyone, and a young woman named Dora brings her to Outpost, an old farmhouse in the Berkshire Hills. Jane G. Austin — no relation to the English novelist — later made the Pilgrims her subject; this 1867 book is her story of a lost child, and the city poor in it are drawn with more sympathy than sentiment. Fifty-four plates of woodland and upland landscape, from Homer's Adirondacks to Munch's elm forest in autumn, follow the lost child from city courts to the Berkshire Hills.
