have preferred to remain inarticulate. It seemed almost perfidious to take advantage of an ignorance that found expression in the guise of an amiability foreign to its nature. However, one may reflect that Nature herself takes advantage of us in many little underhand ways, and after all, Polly's bread and butter, or rather, her hemp-seed and peanuts, depended upon these accomplishments which she pursued in the ardor of ignorance.
To be sure, she would never "show off" under any circumstances. If invited to do so for the entertainment of interested guests, she immediately lapsed into sodden silence, with not even a spark of intelligence on her cryptic visage. But if we were all busy, with no time to stop and listen even, Poll got in her liveliest work—repeating every word of her vocabulary with meticulous care, always ending with her crowning achievement, "God save the Kig" which was said a dozen times in varying but reverent accents.
Every Sunday morning Polly took a bath. It raised some doubt as to her antecedents that this should transpire once a week only and always on Sunday, but so it was. The performance began by the endeavor to get her
