"Very well, slink out," replied Polly cheerfully. "I should like to
see them slink, after they 've been rearing their crested heads round
our table for generations; but I think you credit them with a
sensitiveness they do not, and in the nature of things cannot, possess.
There is something in the unnatural life which hardens both the boarder
and those who board her. However, I don't insist on that method. Let
us try bloodless eviction,--set them quietly out in the street with
their trunks; or strategy,--put one of them in bed and hang out the
smallpox flag. Oh, I can get rid of them in a week, if I once set my
mind on it."

"There is no doubt of that," said Mrs. Oliver meekly.

Polly's brain continued to teem with sinister ideas.

"I shall make Mr. Talbot's bed so that the clothes will come off at the
foot every night. He will remonstrate. I shall tell him that he kicks
them off, and intimate that his conscience troubles him, or he would
never be so restless. He will glare. I shall promise to do better,
yet the clothes will come off worse and worse, and at last, perfectly
disheartened, he will go. I shall tell Mr. Greenwood at the
breakfast-table, what I have been longing for months to tell him, that
we can hear him snore, distinctly, through the partition. He will go.
I shall put cold milk in Mrs. Caldwell's coffee every morning. I shall
mean well, you know, but I shall forget. She will know that I mean
well, and that it is only girlish absent-mindedness, but she will not
endure it very long; she will go. And so, by the exercise of a little
ingenuity, they will depart one by one, remarking that Mrs. Oliver's
boarding-house is not what it used to be; that Pauline is growing a