News and citizen. [volume] (Morrisville, Vt. ;) 1881-current, 1886-03-11
P0LLY'S ALLOWANCE.
BY IsA CARRINGToN CABELL,

The ladies of St. Philips SEWN!
Circle always spoke of Mrs. Fuller's 81;
daughters as if they were an extrava
gance in which she had wilfully in
dulged, and by good management
could have avoided. eff they had only
been boys, nowv" Mrs. Archdeacones
Gas Polly Fuller called her behind he,
august back) Nevins would say. ''Bu
six good for nothing, useless girls ?
Perhaps the reason Mrs. Nevins OBJ
jected so strenuously to Mrs. Fuller'l
preference for the female sex was thai
she had had boys; that is, she had had
one boy, college bred, European toured,
with fortune in his own right, to say
nothing of his prospective heirship
through jeremiah Nevins, Sen, the
richest vestry-man in st. Philips
church. And this adored, petted, and
only boy was very fond of the Fuller
girls, and so attentive to Polly, the
prettiest of the lot, that Bloomingdale
was agog with excitement on the sub
ject. So she would repeat: 'If they
had only been boys-stalwart, hard
working boys! But six girls!"
Now 1t was hard to believe-for the
Archdeaconess was tall, grizzled, bony,
and she might have left Jericho at any
hour ''for her beard was fully grown"
that she, too, must at one time have
been a girl, as Mr.. Bardell was once a
single gentleman; but this fact did not
soften her toward her sex. If Jerry
But we are anticipating,
There certainly were six Fullcrs-
Margaret, Jen, Julie, Polly, Lillian,
Rose. They lived in a little cramped-
up rectory that belonged to St Philips
! poCi little >church oI the outskirts of
Bloomingdale. Their papa was a dear,
wrong headed, clever, impractical
who could never see his way
to orthodoxy, and yet was not sufficient
1y hetrodox for his bishops dismissal.
So he put him where his scientific SER
mons could do least harm and his holy
life most good. Their mamma was
only shade better, as she proved by
having six girls instead of boys. Her
light bread was apt to refuse to rise,
and her preserves had a way of working
after the second week.
If the Archdeaconess could have
broken off the engagement between
the Rev. Alphonso Fuller and Susan his
wife, which had existed for twenty
seven years, and sent the six offending
maidens back to chaos or to paradise,
and married them both TO more suitable
and more practical people, l suppose it
would have been better Providence is
a poor manager, compared to Mrs.
jeremiah Nevins; but she couldn't So
st. Philips had to put up with thou
sand dollar year rector, his shiftless
wife, and his half dozen daughters.
The Fullers were generally absurdly,
provokingly happy. AS long as one has
no ''objects of bigotry and virtue,". it
makes little difference if the cat does
jump on the parlor table. If the car
pet is worn to rags, the tears of the
maid-ofa work may be dried with the
reflection that cinder or two dropped
from the ash-pa will do little damage
But about six months previous it was
borne on the minds of these six females
that if they had an allowance they
would all present much better appear
ances, and spend less money in doing
1t. And when the SIX Fuller girls
made up their minds, there was an end
of it. They interviewed their mamma,
they bullied their papa, they built such
splendid air castles of what they would
do if they only could be allowed to
judge for themselves, that the long-suf-
fering martyr consented, and promised
to let them have their way. Now q
promise in the Fuller family was as
good as a bond-better, for / have
heard many man besides St. Paul de-
clare himself happy, especially after a
panic in the street, except these bonds.
S But the difficulty about the allowance
was this: the day these girls got their
money they felt so enormously rich that
they could not contain themselves and
1t. They forgot it must last six months,
and represented boots, gloves, gowns,
bonnets-a thousand necessaries. They
forgot the waste the lack of parasol
makes in the life of the American girl ;
they only saw the beautiful s. mo, l
will not hold them up to ridicule), and
they longed to spend it, and it burned
in their pockets, till, alas sometimes
they lived like prodigals for three
weeks, and starved and were almost
naked the rest of the twenty-six.
On this particular morning .he whole
family were assembled in the sitting
room. 1t was June day, dewy, rosy,
dimpled day, and "'all the trees on all
the hills had opened their thousand
leaves; the air itself was as fresh and
sweet as the first day that ever broke
in paradise. Even the orphan school
children had come ont the Sunday be-
fore in little pink-sprigged calicoes. All
the Fullers but one had gone to church
also in their neat spring suits, looking
so stylish and jaunty, so sweet and
violet-eyed, that the Archdeaconess
failed in her responses, and scanned
each figure as it went up the aisle with
glance that Julio declared amounted
to an indictment for larceny.
Yes, all the Fullers but one. One
wretched, forlorn, spendthrift of a Full.
Ter staid at home. She had neither
spring gown, nor spring hat, nor boots,
nor parasol; she had spent her allow.
ance long ago on concert tickets, and
candy, and a set of silver iewelry.
So she spent the day in u disrepu
table gingham, and hat that deserves
a chapter to itself, swinging in the big
apple tree, and wishing she had hel
money back. And this unfortunate wa,
named Polly, and she was ninetccr
years old-old enough and pretty
enough to know better
IF VIC had only known how much o
a hole you were in. Polly" said Jeh
"we'd have dubbed in and helped yol
bUy yoItr SI1r1ntr thiDrc