Children's Book Classics - Kate Douglas Wiggin Edition: 11 Novels & 120+ Short Stories for Children. Kate Douglas Wiggin

marching orders were issued.

      The boys tramped over all their favourite bits of country, and the girls visited all their best beloved haunts, every one of them dear from a thousand charming associations. They looked for the last time in Mirror Pool, and saw the reflection of their faces—rather grave faces just then, over the leave-taking.

      The water-mirror might have been glad to keep the picture for ever on its surface—Margery with her sleek braids and serene forehead; with Polly, saucy nose and mischievous eyes, laughing at you like a merry water-sprite; Bell, with her brilliant cheeks glowing like two roses just fallen in the brook; and Gold Elsie, who, if you had put a frame of green leaves about her delicate face and yellow locks, would have looked up at you like a water-lily.

      They wafted a farewell to Pico Negro, and having got rid of the boys, privately embraced a certain Whispering Tree under whose singing branches they had been wont to lie and listen to all the murmuring that went on in the forest.

      Then they clambered into the great thorough-brace wagon, where they all sat in gloomy silence for ten minutes, while Dicky’s tan terrier was found for the fourth time that morning; and the long train, with its baggage-carts, its saddle-horses and its dogged little pack-mules, moved down the rocky steeps that led to civilisation. The gate that shut them in from the county road and the outer world was opened for the last time, and shut with a clang, and it was all over—their summer in a cañon!

       Footnotes:

1 Foot-notes by a rival of the Countess.

2 Is that spelled right?

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

       Table of Contents

       I. A Declaration of Independence

       II. Forecasting the Future

       III. The Doctor Gives Polly a Prescription

       IV. The Boarders Stay, and the Olivers Go

       V. Told in Letters

       VI. Polly Tries a Little Missionary Work

       VII. “Where Ignorance Is Bliss.”

       VIII. Two Fireside Chats

       IX. Hard Times

       X. Edgar Goes to Confession

       XI. The Lady in Black

       XII. The Great Silence

       XIII. A Garden Flower, or a Banian-Tree

       XIV. Edgar Discourses of Scarlet Runners

       XV. Life in the Birds’ Nest

       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

       Table of Contents

      “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