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THE QUEEN OF THE PIRATE ISLE

by Bret Harte



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 humor,
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?

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 sunbonnet 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.

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