tle girl. As they played their innings, she stood beside the prince
and instructed him in the game. Once, since he appeared slow to grasp
her meaning, she caught him by the shoulder and shook him to make it
clearer. The Baron von Habelschwert ground his teeth. When at last
the prince did go in, the baron's heart swelled with proud expectation:
his gallant little charge would display to those English children (they
were neither high, nor well-born) the natural superiority of his royal
blood and race.

The prince, however, did not fulfil this loyal expectation. He hit the
ball, indeed, and in obedience to Pollyooly's shriek of instruction,
started to run. But he started to run the wrong way round. His side
shrieked as one child, as Pollyooly sprang upon him, swung him round,
and shoved him along in the right direction. She succeeded in
arresting his mad course at the first base by one of the shrillest
shrieks of "Stop!" that ever burst from human lung. The next time the
ball was hit she set him going again by a companion shriek; and with
others of a like piercing quality (they seemed to flow from her lungs
in an inexhaustible abundance) she guided him safely round the bases
and home. From the blundering, stumbling way he ran, her shrieks
seemed to be the only things in the world of which he was really
conscious.

The baron watched the confused performance of his little charge with a
strong feeling that something very serious indeed was the matter with
the order of nature. When Pollyooly's side went out to field, he was
no more satisfied by the prince's performance. Whenever the ball came
to him, in spite of the fact that an encouraging, instructive shriek
from Pollyooly reached him first, he either missed it, or fumbled it;
and he always shied it in short. The baron's feeling that there was
something very wrong with the cosmos grew stronger. He became
depressed and yet more depressed by the fact that the prince was
playing to an audience; for all the respectful and admiring nurses
edged down the beach to behold him play; and those of them whose little
charges were playing in the same game with him, assumed insufferable
airs.

After a while the children tired of rounders and betook themselves to
building a sand-castle. Since he had been admitted to their circle on
her instance, Pollyooly seemed to feel herself responsible for the
prince. She seemed also to feel it more important that he should learn
to