ication; but luckily, though good music, pictures, china,
furniture, and "purple and fine linen" were all conspicuous by their
absence, she could feast without money and without price on the
changeful loveliness of the Santa Ynez mountains, the sapphire tints of
the placid Pacific, and the gorgeous splendor of the Californian
wild-flowers, so that her sense of beauty never starved.

Her hand was visible in the modest sitting-room where she now sat with
her mother; for it was pretty and homelike, although its simple
decorations and furnishings had been brought together little by little
during a period of two years; so that the first installments were all
worn out, Polly was wont to remark plaintively, before the last
additions made their appearance.

The straw matting had Japanese figures on it, while a number of rugs
covered the worn places, and gave it an opulent look. The
table-covers, curtains, and portieres were of blue jean worked in
outline embroidery, and Mrs. Oliver's couch had as many pillows as that
of an oriental princess; for Polly's summers were spent camping in a
canon, and she embroidered sofa-cushions and draperies with frenzy
during these weeks of out-of-door life.

Upon the cottage piano was a blue Canton ginger-jar filled with
branches of feathery bamboo that spread its lace-like foliage far and
wide over the ceiling and walls, quite covering the large spot where
the roof had leaked. Various stalks of tropical-looking palms,
distributed artistically about, concealed the gaping wounds in the
walls, inflicted by the Benton children, who had once occupied this
same apartment. Mexican water-jars, bearing peacock feathers, screened
Mr. Benton's two favorite places for scratching matches. The lounge
was the sort of lounge that looks well only between two windows, but
Polly was obliged to place it across the corner where she really needed
the table, because in that position it shielded from the public view
the enormous black spots on the wall where Reginald Benton had flung
the ink-bottle at his angel sister Pansy Belle.

Then there was an umbrella-lamp bestowed by a boarder whom Mrs. Oliver
had nursed through typhoid fever; a banjo; plenty of books and
magazines; and an open fireplace, with a great pitcher of yellow
wild-flowers standing between the old-fashioned brass andirons.

Little Miss Oliver's attitude on the question of the boarders must
stand quite without justification.

"It is a part o