Happy Pollyooly: The Rich Little Poor Girl

by Edgar Jepson

Though neither of them had any conversation, Pollyooly talked away to the prince and the Lump, and was quite content with the grunts of assent with which the prince punctuated her observations. But she was presently annoyed to find that he shone no more as an assistant mushroomer than as a conversationalist. It was not so much that he was ignorant of the difference between mushrooms and toadstools, and equally unskilful in discovering either, as that he often trod on the fairest members of the group he was picking. Pollyooly therefore gave him the basket to carry and picked the mushrooms herself. Twice he dropped it and scattered them over the turf. She chid him but gently and carried it herself.

But destiny, which dogs the steps of princes, was leading him to a catastrophe. The basket was large and growing heavy; but the indefatigable Pollyooly pushed deeper into the marsh. They had crossed several dykes safely; then they came to a plank over a small dyke, nearly dried up. Pollyooly took every possible care to get the expedition across safely. She carried the Lump across and then the basket of mushrooms. Then she turned to watch the passage of the prince. The plank was not more than ten feet long; and it was destiny which chose the exact middle of it for the prince to fall off. He struck the dyke with a splash which drew a cry of delight from the Lump, and sank up to his knees in the thick mud. He burst into a terrified bellow; and Pollyooly hurried down the steep bank to help him out. But destiny had arranged that he should be just out of her reach; and he was too frightened to make the effort to struggle to her helping hand.

For a while Pollyooly, for all her power of resource, was at a loss; and the bellowing of the prince did nothing to clear her wits. Then she saw how she could reach him. She dug her feet into the bank, hugged the plank over the dyke with her left arm, and leaning forward, succeeded in getting a grip of his left wrist, and began to tug. Her grip seemed to inspirit him, for he began to struggle hard toward the bank. It was not an easy business in the thick mud, but thanks to the purchase afforded by the plank, Pollyooly could put most of her strength into the effort and slowly dragged him on to the firmer mud at the edge and then on to the bank.

Still blubbering a little, he followed Pollyooly up the bank; on the top of it she turned and surveyed him with horrified eyes. He was wrapped nearly up to his waist in a smooth, dripping garment of greenish mud; and patches of it adorned the rest of him. It would have been difficult to imagine anything more unlike a Hohenzollern in a white sailor suit; and his face was hardly attractive enough to justify you in comparing him to the dripping, weed-be-draped Lorelei of his native land.

"Well! You are an aggravating little boy! Whatever am I to do with you?" cried Pollyooly in a tone of despair.

The prince uttered an apologetic grunt.

"The only thing to do is to get you home as quick as I can," she said heavily.

She carried the Lump back across the dyke, then the basket of mushrooms. Then she led the prince across it. They took their slow way back to the village, the prince leaving behind him a trail which would have gladdened the heart of the last, or any other, of the Cherokees.

The Baron von Habelschwert, sleeping peacefully beside a sweet work of genius, called "Dove Wifie," which had fallen from his hand, missed the departure of his young charge in the wake of Pollyooly. He slept for an hour; and when he did awake, her friends had moved a long way down the beach. He struggled to his feet, and set out in search of the prince, assured that he was somewhere on the sands playing with his active, but socially impossible, protector. At first he sought him with careless eyes, then with keener; but it was some twenty minutes before he satisfied himself that neither his charge nor Pollyooly were on the sands. Then he set out, in some annoyance to search the village; and when he had drawn blank all the village shops at which sweets were sold, he began to grow anxious and alarmed. For all his military contempt for the English as a people soon to be subjugated, he had a deep distrust of them. It awoke suddenly in its most violent form; and he began to suspect that the perfidious politicians of England had stolen his Hohenzollern.

The suspicion presently became a conviction; and he acted on it with splendid, but unwonted, energy. In little more than ten minutes the village was ringing with the news that the prince was lost; and the baron was toddling furiously along at the head of a band composed of the village children, the village idiot, some idle fishermen, and a number of unoccupied visitors who had leapt at the chance of action. There was no lack of theories. Every other member of the group had one of his own. The baron himself made no secret of his belief that the prince was the victim of a political plot, till the Honourable John Ruffin, out of mere idle curiosity, stopped the procession to enquire its object and on learning it proclaimed his firm conviction that the prince was neither lost, stolen, nor strayed.