Behind the superficialities of Mr. Polly's being, moved a larger and

vaguer distress. The elementary education he had acquired had left him

with the impression that arithmetic was a fluky science and best

avoided in practical affairs, but even the absence of book-keeping and

a total inability to distinguish between capital and interest could

not blind him for ever to the fact that the little shop in the High

Street was not paying. An absence of returns, a constriction of

credit, a depleted till, the most valiant resolves to keep smiling,

could not prevail for ever against these insistent phenomena. One

might bustle about in the morning before dinner, and in the afternoon

after tea and forget that huge dark cloud of insolvency that gathered

and spread in the background, but it was part of the desolation of

these afternoon periods, these grey spaces of time after meals, when

all one's courage had descended to the unseen battles of the pit, that

life seemed stripped to the bone and one saw with a hopeless

clearness.

Let me tell the history of Mr. Polly from the cradle to these present

difficulties.

"First the infant, mewling and puking in its nurse's arms."

There had been a time when two people had thought Mr. Polly the most

wonderful and adorable thing in the world, had kissed his toe-nails,

saying "myum, myum," and marvelled at the exquisite softness and

delicacy of his hair, had called to one another to remark the peculiar

The History of Mr Polly