The Project Gutenberg eBook, Polly Oliver's Problem, by Kate Douglas Smith
Wiggin

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Title: Polly Oliver's Problem

Author: Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin

Release Date: April 15, 2005 [eBook #15630]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

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POLLY OLIVER'S PROBLEM

by

KATE DOUGLAS WIGGIN

With a Biographical Sketch, Portrait, and Illustrations

Boston, New York, and Chicago
Houghton, Mifflin & Company
The Riverside Press, Cambridge

1896

[Frontispiece: Portrait of Mrs. Wiggin]

KATE DOUGLAS WIGGIN.

It is an advantage for an author to have known many places and
different sorts of people, though the most vivid impressions are
commonly those received in childhood and youth. Mrs. Wiggin, as she is
known in literature, was Kate Douglas Smith; she was born in
Philadelphia, and spent her young womanhood in California, but when a
very young child she removed to Hollis in the State of Maine, and since
her maturity has usually made her summer home there; her earliest
recollections thus belong to the place, and she draws inspiration for
her character and scene painting very largely from this New England
neighborhood.

Hollis is a quiet, secluded place, a picturesque but almost deserted
village--if the few houses so widely scattered can be termed a
village--located among the undulating hills that lie along the lower
reaches of the Saco River. Here she plans to do almost all her actual
writing--the story itself is begun long before--and she resorts to the
place with pent-up energy.

A quaint old house of colonial date and style, set in the midst of
extensive grounds and shaded by graceful old trees,--this is
"Quillcote,"--the summer home of Mrs. Wiggin. Quillcote is typical of
many old New England h