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Polly Ann's Sister

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Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Jun 18, 1896

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 22, No. 24.

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Polly Ann's Sister.

By J. L. Harbour

BY J. L. HARBOUR.
Little Polly Ann Hoyt came rushing into her mother's kitchen, eager and excited, one beautiful morning in June.
“O mother! what do you think?”
“I think a good many things, child,” replied Mrs. Hoyt, who was sitting with a great wooden bowl in her lap, ‘working’ a golden mass of butter just from the churn.
“But you never thought of anything like this, I know,” said Polly Ann. “They're going to give away little boys and girls at the Methodist Church over in Hebron next Friday!”
Mrs. Hoyt burst into a laugh. “Who has been telling you such nonsense as that?” she asked.
“O, but it’s true, mother! Mrs. Hart told me just now, when I took the eggs over to her. She’s coming right over to get your basque patterns, and she’ll tell you that—here she is now!”
Mrs. Hart had really started with Polly Ann, but the little girl had been so eager to tell her mother “the news” that she had run on ahead.
“Good-morning, Mrs. Hart,” said Mrs. Hoyt. “Will you just make the cat hop out of that rocking-chair, and take it yourself? I can’t very well get up to get it for you. I guess Polly Ann’s been understanding things with her elbows this morning.”
“Has she been telling you about their going to give away children over in Hebron next Friday?”
“Yes, and it can’t be true.”
“O, but it is true, Mrs. Hoyt!”
“Why, Mrs. Hart! How you talk!”
Mrs. Hart laughed, and said:—
“It’s like this, Mrs. Hoyt: It seems that an agent of an institution called the Little Wayfarers’ Home, in one of the big eastern cities, is going to be at the church with eighteen or twenty children of from six to twelve years of age. He has brought them out here to Ohio to get homes for them; for they have no homes and no parents, but are just poor, unfortunate little ones, such as Jesus maybe had in mind when he said that any kindness shown to even the least of these little ones was a kindness shown to him.”
“It seems queer for children to be given away like that,” said Mrs. Hoyt. “I never heard of such a thing before.”
“I have. They brought a lot out to Westville, where my sister lives, two years ago, and my sister took a real nice little boy on trial for three months, but she adopted him out and out at the end of six weeks, and she couldn’t think more of her own child, if God had given her one, than she thinks of that little fellow. You don’t have to adopt them or bind yourself to keep them permanently at first.”
“Don’t you?”
“No; you can take them on trial for awhile, and if they don’t prove satisfactory, the society will take them back. I am thinking of going over to Hebron Friday and getting one of the children.”
“Why, Mrs. Hart, I should think that you had your hands full now, with five of your own.”
“O, I don’t know! I guess one more wouldn’t make much difference, and all of ours are girls but Johnie, and he’d be so glad to have a little brother. Then I feel so sorry for the poor little orphans, and I’m not sure but it’s my duty to take one of them. It’d be a real good chance for you to get a sister for Polly Ann.”
“O, won’t you, mother?” pleaded Polly Ann.
“I don’t know,” said Mrs. Hoyt, addressing her reply more to Mrs. Hart than to Polly Ann. “I don’t know what my husband would say. I’ve always felt that it was a good deal of a risk to take in strange children like that. There’s no telling how they’ll turn out. But I’ll talk to my husband about it.”
The result of this conference was very disappointing to Polly Ann; for her father and mother decided that they would not go to Hebron on the following Friday.
“Such children as those are apt to have mighty bad blood in their veins,” Mr. Hoyt said. “Nobody knows who or what they are. Lots of them have been picked up right off the street. Then, again, times are so hard we have about all we can do to take care of ourselves.”
Polly heard this decision in tearful silence. She was an only child, and it seemed very hard that she could not have a little sister when one might be had for the asking.
“I’d be willing to give her half of my clothes, mother,” Polly said, “and I’d give her the best half, too—my red cashmere dress and blue sash, and I’d try to eat less, and she could sleep with me.”
“You poor child,” said Mrs. Hoyt sympathetically, “I wish your father could feel that it was best for us to take one of these children, but if he doesn’t, you must be a good little girl and abide by his decision.”
She tried to do this cheerfully, but her pillow was wet with tears on more than one night before Friday came.
A few days after the occasion mentioned, Mrs. Hoyt said to Polly Ann:—
“I wish that you would go down into the pasture, Polly, and see if you can’t find dewberries enough for a couple of pies. There are a good many vines by the fence between our pasture and Mr. Hart’s. I’ll make you a nice little turnover if you’ll get the berries.”
Polly Ann started off with a little shining tin pail on her arm. The pasture was quite a distance from the house. When Polly Ann reached the spot indicated by her mother, she found the berries quite plentiful, and her pail was soon half full. She was down on her knees in some tall grass picking berries from some low-growing vines, when she was startled by some one saying:—
“Hello, little girl!”
Polly Ann was so startled that she upset her pail of berries.
“I’ll help you pick them up,” said the same voice; and Polly, turning around, saw a little girl of about her own age climbing the fence. She was a very pretty little girl, with big blue eyes, and shining brown hair hanging in two long braids down her back, under a wide straw hat with a blue ribbon band.
“I never saw berries growing before,” she said as she came forward. “My name’s Lucy Dean; what’s yours?”
“Polly Ann Hoyt.”
“You live here in this lovely country, don’t you?”
“Yes; don’t you?”
“I’ve just come, but I hope I’ll be able to stay. O, I do hope I shall! It isn’t settled yet. The lady who lives up in that white house, Mrs. Hart, has taken my little brother Ray, and I cried and cried so when they went to separate us over at the church in Hebron yesterday, that Mrs. Hart said we just shouldn’t be separated—at least we shouldn’t be put in places far apart. She said she’d keep both of us first, even if she did have four little girls of her own.”
“Then you’re from the Little Wayfarers’ Home,” said Polly.
“Yes. It was a real nice place, too, but it’s lovelier here. It looked so beautiful down here that I just slipped off all by myself to see it. How many brothers and sisters have you?”
“None.”
“O, how dreadful! Get awful lonesome, don’t you? But we’d better pick up these spilled berries, and then I’ll help you gather the pail full.”
“My mother will make you a turnover if you will,” said Polly. “She said she’d make me one, and I know she’ll make you one, too, if you’ll go home with me.”
“I’ll go back and ask Mrs. Hart if I may. She said I could come off down here, but I think I’d better ask her about it before I go to your house.”
Half an hour later Polly and Lucy appeared in Mrs. Hoyt’s kitchen. Mrs. Hart had given Lucy permission to stay as long as it would be convenient for Mrs. Hoyt to have her, and it was late in the afternoon before Lucy went back to Mrs. Hart’s. Polly went with her to see little Ray.
When Polly had gone up to her own quiet little room that night, Mrs. Hoyt said to her husband:—
“David, I want you to let me take that little girl and keep her. She’s as polite and well-mannered a little girl as I ever saw, and she’s had as good Christian training as our own child. She and Polly would be so happy together. When I kissed Polly good-night a little while ago, she put her arms around my neck and whispered, ‘Can’t I have Lucy for my sister, mother?’ and I said I’d ask you. What do you say, David?”
“I say yes,” replied Mr. Hoyt, with marked emphasis. “Fact is, Martha, I’ve been thinking about the matter all day, and it seems to me that if Joe Hart and his wife, with their five, can take in another, we can surely take one. I’m ashamed to think that I refused in the first place. If the Harts would give him up, I’d be willing to take the boy, too.”
Mr. and Mrs. Hart consented to this offer of Mr. Hoyt, because they felt that it would be kinder to Ray and Lucy to give them a home together, and because there were still two or three little boys unprovided for in Hebron, and they could secure another one to take Ray’s place in their house. Polly Ann was at first speechless with joy, and then she could talk of nothing else.
“It’s so nice, mother,” she said, “to talk about ‘my sister Lucy’ and ‘my little brother Ray.’ I just know that you’ll never be sorry you adopted them”—a prediction that was fully verified as the years went by.—The Examiner.