Chapter the Fourth

Mr. Polly an Orphan


I

Then a great change was brought about in the life of Mr. Polly by the
death of his father. His father had died suddenly--the local
practitioner still clung to his theory that it was imagination he
suffered from, but compromised in the certificate with the
appendicitis that was then so fashionable--and Mr. Polly found himself
heir to a debateable number of pieces of furniture in the house of his
cousin near Easewood Junction, a family Bible, an engraved portrait of
Garibaldi and a bust of Mr. Gladstone, an invalid gold watch, a gold
locket formerly belonging to his mother, some minor jewelry and
_bric_-a-brac, a quantity of nearly valueless old clothes and an
insurance policy and money in the bank amounting altogether to the sum
of three hundred and ninety-five pounds.

Mr. Polly had always regarded his father as an immortal, as an eternal
fact, and his father being of a reserved nature in his declining years
had said nothing about the insurance policy. Both wealth and
bereavement therefore took Mr. Polly by surprise and found him a
little inadequate. His mother's death had been a childish grief and
long forgotten, and the strongest affection in his life had been for
Parsons. An only child of sociable tendencies necessarily turns his