That little fir-tree, you will remember, thought of nothing so much as growing. The children sitting beside it would often exclaim, “How pretty and little it is!” _It could not bear to hear that_, says Andersen.
It is not growing like a tree In bulk, doth make men better be
The case of the little girl known to me is just by so much sadder than that of the little fir-tree that she knows that her growing days are over. When last I saw her she was trying to give length to herself by a long tail to her dress, but the world was not deluded thus, and measured her, as naturalists measure the mouse, “not including the tail.”
Happily a major number of small girls still carry a high heart, knowing that maids, as well as men, may be “little, very little, but not insignificant.”
Those words are Sir Walter Scott’s in reference to Thomas Moore, whose pseudonym, it may be remembered, was at one time Thomas Little.
This is perhaps the place in which to say a word about the persons whose littleness is bound up with their fame. One of the greatest generals of all time had for his best known soubriquet “the little corporal.” Omit the “little” in that case, and the appellation is robbed of all that gives piquancy to it.
How much there may be in the mere word “little” is shown in the following—true—story.
A living sculptor of note, a foreigner residing in London, made a tender group composed of a mother and her child. The mother was counting the baby’s toes, and beneath the group was carved a legend which the artist conceived to embody a familiar nursery rhyme. The legend ran, “One pig went to market.”
[Illustration: _Ah, von leettle peeg—oui, oui!_]
“Sir, sir!” remonstrated an Irishwoman, to whose inspection the group was subjected, “you’ve made a terrible omission. You’ve left out ‘little.’ No human mother would sing to her babe, ‘One pig went to market.’”
The ironical use of big for small and small for big is a thing of old custom. Thus one of the biggest English Johns who ever lived was known to his contemporaries, and is still known to those who cherish his memory, as Little John, and it is by a similar pleasantry, according to a learned writer, that Maria, who in Shakespeare’s play of _Twelfth Night_ is represented as _a little woman_, is called by Viola “Olivia’s giant,” and that Sir Toby says to her “Good-night, Penthesilea,” meaning by Penthesilea _amazon_, if his meaning was not merely (and to me this seems to be the more likely thing) to twit the little woman by giving her a long name.