all: it opened into a
tiny bedroom with a sloping roof. No, this was all, all there was of
it: just these two miserable little poky rooms! She raised her head and
looked round, and the tears welled up in spite of herself. The roof was
so low that you could almost touch it; the window was no larger than a
pocket-handkerchief; there were chinks between the slabs of the walls.
And from one of these she now saw a spider crawl out, a huge black
tarantula, with horrible hairy legs. Polly was afraid of spiders; and
at this the tears began to overflow and to trickle down her cheeks.
Holding her skirts to her--the new dress she had made with such pride,
now damp, and crushed, and soiled--she sat down and put her feet, in
their soaked, mud-caked, little prunella boots, on the rung of her
chair, for fear of other monsters that might be crawling the floor.

And then, while she sat thus hunched together, the voices outside were
suddenly drowned in a deafening noise--in a hideous, stupefying din,
that nearly split one's eardrums: it sounded as though all the tins and
cans in the town were being beaten and banged before the door. Polly
forgot the tarantula, forgot her bitter disappointment with her new
home. Her black eyes wide with fear, her heart thudding in her chest,
she sprang to her feet and stood ready, if need be, to defend herself.
Where, oh where was Richard?

It was the last straw. When, some five minutes later, Mahony came
bustling in: he had soothed the "kettledrummers" and sent them off with
a handsome gratuity, and he carried the trunk on his own shoulder, Long
Jim following behind with bags and bundles: when he entered, he found
little Polly sitting with her head huddled on her arms, crying as
though her heart would break.

Part II

Chapter I

Over the fathomless grey seas that tossed between, dissevering the
ancient and gigantic continent from the tiny motherland, unsettling
rumours ran. After close on forty years' fat peace, England had armed
for hostilities again, her fleet set sail for a foreign sea. Such was
the news the sturdy clipper-ships brought out, in tantalising
fragments; and those who, like Richard Mahony, were mere
birds-of-passage in the colony, and had friends and relatives going to
the front, caught hungrily at every detail. But to the majority of the
colonists what England had done, or left undone, in preparation for
war, was of small account. To them the vital question was: will th