Polly's remorseful confusion here her good father equally proud of
her precocious interest and his own knowledge, at once interfered
with an unintelligible account of the abdication of various Queens
in history until Polly's head ached again. Well meant as it was, it
only settled in the child's mind that she must keep the awful secret
to herself and that no one could understand her.

[Illustration]

The eventful day dawned without any unusual sign of importance. It
was one of the cloudless summer days of the Californian foot hills,
bright, dry, and as the morning advanced, hot in the white sunshine.
The actual, prosaic house in which the Pirates apparently lived, was
a mile from a mining settlement on a beautiful ridge of pine woods
sloping gently towards a valley on the one side, and on the other
falling abruptly into a dark deep olive gulf of pine trees, rocks,
and patches of red soil. Beautiful as the slope was, looking over to
the distant snow peaks which seemed to be in another world than
theirs, the children found a greater attraction in the fascinating
depths of a mysterious gulf, or "cañon," as it was called, whose
very name filled their ears with a weird music. To creep to the edge
of the cliff, to sit upon the brown branches of some fallen pine,
and putting aside the dried tassels to look down upon the backs of
wheeling hawks that seemed to hang in mid-air was a never failing
delight. Here Polly would try to trace the winding red ribbon of
road that was continually losing itself among the dense pines of the
opposite mountains; here she would listen to the far off strokes of
a woodman's axe, or the rattle of some heavy waggon, miles away,
crossing the pebbles of a dried up water course. Here, too, the
prevailing colours of the mountains, red and white and green, most