lump of auriferous rock to which all the value is given by rare veins

of unbusinesslike joy, who reads Boccaccio and Rabelais and

Shakespeare with gusto, and uses "Stertoraneous Shover" and "Smart

Junior" as terms of bitterest opprobrium, is not likely to make a

great success under modern business conditions. Mr. Polly dreamt

always of picturesque and mellow things, and had an instinctive hatred

of the strenuous life. He would have resisted the spell of

ex-President Roosevelt, or General Baden Powell, or Mr. Peter Keary,

or the late Dr. Samuel Smiles, quite easily; and he loved Falstaff and

Hudibras and coarse laughter, and the old England of Washington Irving

and the memory of Charles the Second's courtly days. His progress was

necessarily slow. He did not get rises; he lost situations; there was

something in his eye employers did not like; he would have lost his

places oftener if he had not been at times an exceptionally brilliant

salesman, rather carefully neat, and a slow but very fair

window-dresser.

He went from situation to situation, he invented a great wealth of

nicknames, he conceived enmities and made friends--but none so richly

satisfying as Parsons. He was frequently but mildly and discursively

in love, and sometimes he thought of that girl who had given him a

yellow-green apple. He had an idea, amounting to a flattering

certainty, whose youthful freshness it was had stirred her to

self-forgetfulness. And sometimes he thought of Foxbourne sleeping

prosperously in the sun. And he began to have moods of discomfort and

lassitude and ill-temper due to the beginnings of indigestion.

The History of Mr Polly