The Japanese Twins

Name: The Japanese Twins
Author: Lucy Fitch Perkins

by Lucy Fitch Perkins

Pages: about 70
Category: Literature & Fiction
Language: English
Reading time: 77 min at 250 wpm

Start readingThe whole book, as cards or one word at a time. 43 min at 450 wpm in Read mode.

From the opening

Away, away, ever so far away, near the western shores of the Ocean of Peace, lie the Happy Islands, the Paradise of Children.
Some people call this ocean the "Pacific" and they call the Happy Islands "Japan," but the meaning is just the same. Those are only their grown-up names, that you find them by on the map, in the geography.
They are truly Happy Islands, for the sun shines there so brightly that all the people go about with pleasant, smiling faces, and the children play out of doors the whole year through without ever quarreling. And they are never, never spanked! Of course, the reason for that is that they are so good they never, never need it! Or maybe their fathers and mothers do not believe in spanking.
I have even been told--though I don't know whether to think it's true or not--that Japanese parents believe more in sugar-plums than in punishments to make children good!
In a little town near a large city on one of the Happy Islands, there is a garden. In the garden stands a house, and in that House there live Taro, who is a boy, and Take (Pronounce Tah'-kay), who is a girl.
They are twins. They are Japanese Twins and they are just five years old, both of them.
Of course, Taro and Take do not live alone in the house in the garden. Their Father and Mother live there too, and their Grandmother, who is very old, and the Baby, who is very young.
Taro and Take cannot remember when Grandmother and Father and Mother happened, because they were all there when the Twins came; and the Twins could not possibly imagine the world without Father and Mother and Grandmother.
But with the Baby it was different. One day there wasn't any Baby at all, and the next day after that, there he was, looking very new but quite at home already in the little house in the garden, where Taro and Take lived.

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The Japanese Twins

From the opening

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