The days spent in that strange hot twilight must have seemed very long to children, even to those who had forgotten or never known the freedom of life in England; but Mrs. Sherwood had plenty of ways of filling her long quiet hours. She wrote a number of little stories about life in India, which were very much liked in their day and went through many editions. One of these was called _The Ayah and Lady_, and told about a native servant, her ignorant notions and strange ways, and how her mistress tried to do her good. Another was _Lucy and her Dhaye_, the history of a little English girl and her dark-skinned nurse, who was so devoted to her that she nearly broke her heart when Lucy went home to England and she was left behind. But the best of them all was _Little Henry and his Bearer_, which is one of the most famous stories ever written for children. The history of little Henry, the neglected orphan child whom nobody loved save his poor faithful heathen "bearer," or native servant, is exceedingly pretty and touching.
Mrs. Sherwood was always thinking about children and trying to find out ways of helping them to be happy and good. A page from her diary will show how often she must have been grieved and distressed at the spoilt boys and girls she saw in the houses of the English merchants and Civil servants at Calcutta and elsewhere.
"I must now proceed," she writes, "to some description of Miss Louisa, the eldest daughter then in India of our friends, who at that time might have been about six or seven. She was tall of her age, very brown, and very pale. She had been entirely reared in India, and was accustomed from her earliest infancy to be attended by a multitude of servants, whom she despised thoroughly as being black, although, no doubt, she preferred their society to her own country-people, as they ministered with much flattery and servility to her wants. Wherever she had moved during these first years of her life she had been followed by her ayah, and probably by one or two bearers, and she was perfectly aware that if she got into any mischief they would be blamed and not herself. In the meantime, except in the article of food, every desire and every caprice and every want had been indulged to satiety. No one who has not seen it could imagine the profusion of toys which are scattered about an Indian house wherever the 'babalogue' (children people) are permitted to range. There may be seen fine polished and painted toys from Benares, in which all the household utensils of the country, the fruits, and even the animals, are represented, the last most ludicrously incorrect. Toys in painted clay from Morshedabad and Calcutta, representing figures of gods and goddesses, with horses, camels, elephants, peacocks, and parrots, and now and then a 'tope walla,' or hat wearer, as they call the English, in full regimentals and cocked hat, seated on a clumsy, ill-formed thing meant for a horse. Then add to these English, French, and Dutch toys, which generally lie pell-mell in every corner where the listless, toy-satiated child may have thrown or kicked them.