And then they began to call her their sweet, pwecious mummy, their little dear mummykins, and all the nice names they could think of; and as they all tried to kiss her at once, she had to say she would try, if only to save herself from suffocation.
Here was a thing—Polly Flinders, apparently so harmless, turning on her and rending her!
'You will have to go away, then, while I try,' she said, feeling very wretched, though with a faint hope that they would prefer to stay and play games, and let her off making a tune rather than be banished. But they made for the schoolroom door with the greatest alacrity. 'And then you calls us when it is ready,' they cried cheerfully, as they disappeared.
I don't suppose any of you children who read this story have ever written a tune, for if you have you are what is known as prodigies, which are an unpleasant variety of children, happily, for the peace of parents, exceedingly rare. But you leave off being a prodigy after a certain age, and this mother was much too old to be one, and had never shown the least symptoms of being one at any time; and when she was left alone to write the tune, and knew it had somehow got to be done, she felt as uncomfortable as you would if you were shut up in a room alone with a piano and told to compose music. But what will not mothers do for their children? You ask your mother to write tunes for you, and see if she will not do it at once! This mother went over to the piano and sat down, and first of all wished she had never heard of Polly Flinders and her toes. Then she wished that, having heard of them, she had kept the knowledge of them from her children. And then she began to agonise over a tune. You know there are some people who can loftily write down tunes ten miles away from the nearest piano; but this mother wasn't one of that sort, and she sat and agonised, with the soft pedal on so that the babies should not hear the bones of Polly's musical skeleton rattling before the skin had been produced. Then, as she had no music-paper, she got a pencil and a sheet of note-paper and wrote the tune down, the agonies at this stage becoming acute. And then she stared at it gloomily, trying to persuade herself that there was at least a sort of rude honesty about it, and hoped the babies would be pleased.
'Come in, babies!' she called faintly.
This is the tune:—
LITTLE POLLY FLINDERS.
