fascinated. After that they made a sort of password of: "Do you bite

your thumbs at Us, Sir?"

To which the countersign was: "We bite our thumbs."

For weeks the glory of Shakespeare's Verona lit Mr. Polly's life. He

walked as though he carried a sword at his side, and swung a mantle

from his shoulders. He went through the grimy streets of Port Burdock

with his eye on the first floor windows--looking for balconies. A

ladder in the yard flooded his mind with romantic ideas. Then Parsons

discovered an Italian writer, whose name Mr. Polly rendered as

"Bocashieu," and after some excursions into that author's remains the

talk of Parsons became infested with the word "amours," and Mr.

Polly would stand in front of his hosiery fixtures trifling with paper

and string and thinking of perennial picnics under dark olive trees in

the everlasting sunshine of Italy.

And about that time it was that all Three Ps adopted turn-down collars

and large, loose, artistic silk ties, which they tied very much on one

side and wore with an air of defiance. And a certain swashbuckling

carriage.

And then came the glorious revelation of that great Frenchman whom Mr.

Polly called "Rabooloose." The Three Ps thought the birth feast of

Gargantua the most glorious piece of writing in the world, and I am

not certain they were wrong, and on wet Sunday evenings where there

The History of Mr Polly