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Элинор Портер / Eleanor H. Porter

Поллианна / Pollyanna

Chapter I. Miss Polly

Miss Polly Harrington entered her kitchen a little hurriedly this June morning. Nancy, who was washing dishes at the sink, looked up in surprise.

“Nancy!”

“Nancy, when I’m talking to you, I wish you to stop your work and listen to what I say. ”

Nancy flushed. She set the pitcher down at once.

“Finish your morning work, Nancy,” Miss Polly said, “and clear the little room in the attic and make up the cot bed. Sweep the room and clean it, of course, after you clear out boxes. ”

Miss Polly hesitated, then went on: “I suppose I may as well tell you now, Nancy. My niece, Miss Pollyanna Whittier, will soon live with me. She is eleven years old, and she will sleep in that room.

“Nice? Well, that isn’t exactly the word I should use,” said Miss Polly, stiffly. “However, I am a good woman, I hope; and I know my duty. ”

“Don’t forget to clean the corners, Nancy,” she finished sharply, as she left the room.

“Yes, ma’am,” sighed Nancy.

“Dear Madam: – I regret to inform you that the Rev. John Whittier died two weeks ago, leaving one child, a girl eleven years old.

“Hoping to hear favorably from you soon, I remain,

“Respectfully yours,

“Jeremiah O. White. ”

As she sat now, with the letter in her hands, her thoughts went back to her sister, Jennie, Pollianna’s mother, and to the time when Jennie, as a girl of twenty, married the young minister and went south with him. The family had little more to do with the missionary’s wife.

In one of her letters Jennie wrote about Pollyanna, her last baby, the other babies had all died. She named her “Pollyanna” for her two sisters, Polly and Anna.