The History of Mr. Polly

were for the incipient bankrupt

ys and holidays shone out like diamonds among pebbles. They shone with the mellow splendour of evening skies reflected in calm water, and athwart them all went old

turn singing through the night, or having an "argy bargy" about the stars, on Monday evening. They would come over the hills out of the pleasant English country-side in which they

say. There is no satisfactory plural to O'

tion it,"

e harbour, past a white troopship and past the trim front and the ships and interesting vistas of the dockyard to the shallow channels and rocky

es of honeysuckle and dogrose. Greatly daring, they would follow green bridle paths through primrose studded undergrowths, or wander waist deep in the bracken of beech woods. About twenty miles from Port Burdock there came a region of hop gardens and hoast crowned farms, and further on, to be reached only by cheap tickets at Bank Holiday times, was a steri

e that shine so steadfastly throughout the year. Picardy is pink and white and pleasant in the blossom time, Burgundy goes on with its sunshine and wide hillsides and cramped vineyards, a beautiful tune repeated and repeated, Italy gives salitas and wayside chapels and chestnuts and olive orchards, the Ardennes has its woods and gorges - Touraine and the Rhineland, the wide Campagna with its distant Apennines, and the neat prosperities and mountain backgrounds of South Germany, all clamour their especial merits at one's memory. And there a

oomed to toil behind counters in such places as Port Burdock for the better part of their lives. They would forget the customers and shopw

ld take them for drapers, and there might be a pretty serving girl or a jol

ork out always at cold beef and pickles, or fried ham and eggs and shandygaff, two

uck-pond, a waiting waggon, the church tower, a sleepy cat, the blue heavens, with the sizzle of the frying audible behind one! The keen sm

emen." Better hearing that tha

he sitting down

d, O'

t bag all the

prefer one and so impossible to say which it was held her there, until a distant maternal voice called her away. Afterwards as they left the inn she waylaid them at the orchard corner and gave them, a little shyly, three keen yellow-green apples - and

mother of forbidding aspec

stood with a pink flush upon her, faintly smiling and yet earnest, parting the branches of the hedgero

sely as possible, and so came at last to Foxbourne, tha

ng machines, and a shelter on the parade in which the Three Ps sat after a satisfying but rather expensive lunch that had included celery. Rows of verandahed villas proffered apartments,

siness," said Platt sagel

n Mr. Poll