



Produced by Charlene Taylor, Emmy and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive/American Libraries.)










POLLY




IN UNIFORM STYLE


    MARSE CHAN. A Tale of Old Virginia. Illustrated by W.
      T. Smedley.

    MEH LADY. A Story of the War. Illustrated by C. S.
      Reinhart.

    POLLY. A Christmas Recollection. Illustrated by A.
      Castaigne.

    UNC' EDINBURG. A Plantation Echo. Illustrated by B.
      West Clinedinst.

    _Each, small quarto, $1.00_

[Illustration: "_The young man found it necessary to lean over and
throw a steadying arm around her._"]




POLLY [Illustration]

A CHRISTMAS RECOLLECTION

    BY THOMAS NELSON PAGE

    ILLUSTRATED BY A. CASTAIGNE

[Illustration]

    CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
    NEW YORK, 1897 [Illustration]




    Copyright, 1894, by
    Charles Scribner's Sons

    TROW DIRECTORY
    PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY
    NEW YORK




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


  "_The young man found it necessary to lean over and throw
        a steadying arm around her._"                    Frontispiece.

  _Vignette heading._                                          Page 1.

  "_Drinkwater Torm fell sprawling on the floor._"            Page 10.

  "_'I will!' he said, throwing up his head._"                Page 22.

  "_There he was standing on the bridge just before her._"    Page 30.

  "_He made Torm, Charity, and a half-dozen younger
        house-servants dress him._"                           Page 38.




[Illustration]


IT was Christmas Eve. I remember it just as if it was yesterday. The
Colonel had been pretending not to notice it, but when Drinkwater
Torm[A] knocked over both the great candlesticks, and in his attempt to
pick them up lurched over himself and fell sprawling on the floor, he
yelled at him. Torm pulled himself together, and began an explanation,
in which the point was that he had not "teched a drap in Gord knows how
long," but the Colonel cut him short.

"Get out of the room, you drunken vagabond!" he roared.

Torm was deeply offended. He made a low, grand bow, and with as much
dignity as his unsteady condition would admit, marched very statelily
from the room, and passing out through the dining-room, where he
stopped to abstract only one more drink from the long, heavy, cut-glass
decanter on the sideboard, meandered to his house in the back-yard,
where he proceeded to talk religion to Charity, his wife, as he always
did when he was particularly drunk. He was expounding the vision of the
golden candlestick, and the bowl and seven lamps and two olive-trees,
when he fell asleep.

The roarer, as has been said, was the Colonel; the meanderer was
Drinkwater Torm. The Colonel gave him the name, "because," he said, "if
he were to drink water once he would die."

As Drinkwater closed the door, the Colonel continued, fiercely:

"Damme, Polly, I will! I'll sell him to-morrow morning; and if I can't
sell him I'll give him away."

Polly, with troubled great dark eyes, was wheedling him vigorously.

"No; I tell you, I'll sell him.--'Misery in his back!' the mischief!
he's a drunken, trifling, good-for-nothing <DW65>! and I have sworn to
sell him a thousand--yes, ten thousand times; and now I'll have to do
it to keep my word."

This was true. The Colonel swore this a dozen times a day--every time
Torm got drunk, and as that had occurred very frequently for many
years before Polly was born, he was not outside of the limit. Polly,
however, was the only one this threat ever troubled. The Colonel knew
he could no more have gotten on without Torm than his old open-faced
watch, which looked for all the world like a model of himself, could
have run without the mainspring. From tying his shoes and getting his
shaving-water to making his juleps and lighting his candles, which was
all he had to do, Drinkwater Torm was necessary to him. (I think he
used to make the threat just to prove to himself that Torm did not own
him; if so, he failed in his purpose--Torm did own him.) Torm knew it
as well as he, or better; and while Charity, for private and wifely
reasons, occasionally held the threat over him when his expoundings
passed even her endurance, she knew it also.

Thus, Polly was the only one it deceived or frightened. It always
deceived her, and she never rested until she had obtained Torm's
reprieve "for just one more time." So on this occasion, before she got
down from the Colonel's knees, she had given him in bargain "just one
more squeeze," and received in return Torm's conditional pardon, "only
till next time."

Everybody in the county knew the Colonel, and everybody knew Drinkwater
Torm, and everybody who had been to the Colonel's for several years
past (and that was nearly everybody in the county, for the Colonel
kept open house) knew Polly. She had been placed in her chair by the
Colonel's side at the club dinner on her first birthday after her
arrival, and had been afterward placed on the table and allowed to
crawl around among and in the dishes to entertain the gentlemen, which
she did to the applause of every one, and of herself most of all;
and from that time she had exercised in her kingdom the functions of
both Vashti and Esther, and whatever Polly ordered was done. If the
old inlaid piano in the parlor had been robbed of strings, it was all
right, for Polly had taken them. Bob had cut them out for her, without
a word of protest from anyone but Charity. The Colonel would have given
her his heartstrings if Polly had required them.

She had owned him body and soul from the second he first laid eyes on
her, when, on the instant he entered the room, she had stretched out
her little chubby hands to him, and on his taking her had, after a few
infantile caresses, curled up and, with her finger in her mouth, gone
to sleep in his arms like a little white kitten.

Bob used to wonder in a vague, boyish way where the child got her
beauty, for the Colonel weighed two hundred and fifty pounds, and
was as ugly as a red head and thirty or forty years of Torm's
mint-juleps piled on a somewhat reckless college career could make
him; but one day, when the Colonel was away from home, Charity showed
him a daguerreotype of a lady, which she got out of the top drawer
of the Colonel's big secretary with the brass lions on it, and it
looked exactly like Polly. It had the same great big dark eyes and
the same soft white look, though Polly was stouter; for she was a
great tomboy, and used to run wild over the place with Bob, climbing
cherry-trees, fishing in the creek, and looking as blooming as a
rose, with her hair all tangled over her pretty head, until she grew
quite large, and the Colonel got her a tutor. He thought of sending
her to a boarding-school, but the night he broached the subject he
raised such a storm, and Polly was in such a tempest of tears, that
he gave up the matter at once. It was well he did so, for Polly and
Charity cried all night and Torm was so overcome that even next
morning he could not bring the Colonel his shaving-water, and he
had to shave with cold water for the first time in twenty years. He
therefore employed a tutor. Most people said the child ought to have
had a governess, and one or two single ladies of forgotten age in
the neighborhood delicately hinted that they would gladly teach her;
but the Colonel swore that he would have no women around him, and he
would be eternally condemned if any should interfere with Polly; so he
engaged Mr. Cranmer, and invited Bob to come over and go to school to
him also, which he did; for his mother, who had up to that time taught
him herself, was very poor, and was unable to send him to school, her
husband, who was the Colonel's fourth cousin, having died largely
indebted, and all of his property, except a small farm adjoining the
Colonel's, and a few <DW64>s, having gone into the General Court.

Bob had always been a great favorite with the Colonel, and ever since
he was a small boy he had been used to coming over and staying with him.

He could gaff a chicken as well as Drinkwater Torm, which was a great
accomplishment in the Colonel's eyes; for he had the best game-chickens
in the county, and used to fight them, too, matching them against
those of one or two of his neighbors who were similarly inclined, until
Polly grew up and made him stop. He could tame a colt quicker than
anybody on the plantation. Moreover he could shoot more partridges in
a day than the Colonel, and could beat him shooting with a pistol as
well, though the Colonel laid the fault of the former on his being so
fat, and that of the latter on his spectacles. They used to practice
with the Colonel's old pistols that hung in their holsters over the
tester of his bed, and about which Drinkwater used to tell so many
lies; for although they were kept loaded, and their brass-mounted butts
peeping out of their leathern covers used to look ferocious enough to
give some apparent ground for Torm's story of how "he and the Colonel
had shot Judge Cabell spang through the heart," the Colonel always said
that Cabell behaved very handsomely, and that the matter was arranged
on the field without a shot. Even at that time some people said that
Bob's mother was trying to catch the Colonel, and that if the Colonel
did not look out she would yet be the mistress of his big plantation