THE QUEEN OF THE PIRATE ISLE.
I first knew her as the Queen of the Pirate Isle.
To the best of my recollection she had no reasonable
right to that title. She was only nine years
old, inclined to plumpness and good humour, deprecated
violence and had never been to sea. Need it be
added that she did not live in an island and
that her name was “Polly.”
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
Perhaps I ought to explain that she had already known
other experiences of a purely imaginative character.
Part of her existence had been passed as a Beggar
Child—solely indicated by a shawl tightly
folded round her shoulders and chills,—as
a Schoolmistress, unnecessarily severe; as a Preacher,
singularly personal in his remarks, and once, after
reading one of Cooper’s novels, as an Indian
Maiden. This was, I believe, the only instance
when she had borrowed from another’s fiction.
Most of the characters that she assumed for days and
sometimes weeks at a time were purely original in
conception; some so much so as to be vague to the general
understanding. I remember that her personation
of a certain Mrs. Smith, whose individuality was supposed
to be sufficiently represented by a sun-bonnet worn
wrong side before and a weekly addition to her family,
was never perfectly appreciated by her own circle
although she lived the character for a month.
Another creation known as “The Proud Lady”—a
being whose excessive and unreasonable haughtiness
was so pronounced as to give her features the expression
of extreme nausea, caused her mother so much alarm
that it had to be abandoned. This was easily effected.
The Proud Lady was understood to have died. Indeed,
most of Polly’s impersonations were got rid
of in this way, although it by no means prevented
their subsequent reappearance. “I thought
Mrs. Smith was dead,” remonstrated her mother
at the posthumous appearance of that lady with a new
infant. “She was buried alive and kem to!”
said Polly with a melancholy air. Fortunately,
the representation of a resuscitated person required
such extraordinary acting, and was, through some uncertainty
of conception, so closely allied in facial expression
to the Proud Lady, that Mrs. Smith was resuscitated
only for a day.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
The origin of the title of the Queen of the Pirate
Isle, may be briefly stated as follows:—
An hour after luncheon, one day, Polly, Hickory Hunt,
her cousin, and Wan Lee, a Chinese page, were crossing
the nursery floor in a Chinese junk. The sea
was calm and the sky cloudless. Any change in
the weather was as unexpected as it is in books.
Suddenly a West Indian Hurricane, purely local in
character and unfelt anywhere else, struck Master
Hickory and threw him overboard, whence, wildly swimming
for his life and carrying Polly on his back, he eventually
