3 Fifty miles an hour, Jack says.
4 Poetic licence.
5 Gone back to cold cream.
6 And pie.
7 For sale at all bookstores, ten cents a copy.
8 ‘Four little white doves began to coo, To coo to their mates so fair; And each to the other dove said, ‘Your coo With mine cannot compare!’
POLLY OLIVER'S PROBLEM:
A Story for Girls
I. A Declaration of Independence
III. The Doctor Gives Polly a Prescription
IV. The Boarders Stay, and the Olivers Go
VI. Polly Tries a Little Missionary Work
VII. “Where Ignorance Is Bliss.”
XIII. A Garden Flower, or a Banian-Tree
XIV. Edgar Discourses of Scarlet Runners
XVI. The Candle Called Patience
XVII. Polly Launches Her Ships
XVIII. The Children’s Hour: Reported in a Letter by an Eye-Witness
“What you can do, or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.”
GOETHE.
“Pretty Polly Oliver, my hope and my fear,
Pretty Polly Oliver, I’ve loved you so dear!”
DINAH MARIA MULOCK
Chapter I.
A Declaration of Independence
“I have determined only one thing definitely,” said Polly Oliver; “and that is, the boarders must go. Oh, how charming that sounds! I ‘ve been thinking it ever since I was old enough to think, but I never cast it in such an attractive, decisive form before. ‘The Boarders Must Go!’ To a California girl it is every bit as inspiring as ‘The Chinese Must Go.’ If I were n’t obliged to set the boarders’ table, I ‘d work the motto on a banner this very minute, and march up and down the plaza with it, followed by a crowd of small boys with toy drums.”
“The Chinese never did go,” said Mrs. Oliver suggestively, from the sofa.
“Oh, that’s a trifle; they had a treaty or something, and besides, there are so many of them, and they have such an object in staying.”
“You can’t turn people out of the house on a moment’s warning.”
“Certainly not. Give them twenty-four hours, if necessary. We can choose among several methods of getting rid of them. I can put up a placard with
BOARDERS, HO!
printed on it in large letters, and then assemble them in the banquet-hall and make them a speech.”
“You would insult them,” objected Mrs. Oliver feebly, “and they are perfectly innocent.”
“Insult them? Oh, mamma, how unworthy of you! I shall speak to them firmly but very gently. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ I shall begin, ‘you have done your best to make palatable the class of human beings to which you belong, but you have utterly failed, and you must go! Board, if you must, ladies and gentlemen, but not here! Sap, if you must, the foundations of somebody else’s private paradise, but not ours. In the words of the Poe-et, “Take thy beaks from off our door.”’ Then it will be over, and they will go out.”
“Slink out, I should say,” murmured Polly’s mother.
“Very well, slink out,” replied Polly cheerfully. “I should like to see them slink, after they ‘ve been rearing their crested heads round our table for generations; but I think you credit them with a sensitiveness they do not, and in the nature of things cannot, possess. There is something in the unnatural life which hardens both the boarder and those who board her. However, I don’t insist on that method. Let us try bloodless eviction,—set them quietly out in the street with their trunks; or strategy,—put one of them in bed and hang out the smallpox flag. Oh, I can get rid of them in a week, if I once set my mind on it.”
“There is no doubt of that,” said Mrs. Oliver meekly.
Polly’s
