The Queen

OF THE

Pirate Isle

BY

BRET HARTE

ILLUSTRATED BY

KATE GREENAWAY

A FACSIMILE FROM THE ORIGINAL
PUBLICATION OF 1885

Harte, Bret, 1836-1902.

ISBN 0 86441 018 2.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

[Transcriber's Note: A larger version of each illustration can be viewed by clicking / selecting the thumbnail picture.]

THE QUEEN OF THE PIRATE ISLE.

I first knew her as the Queen of the Pirate Isle. To the best of my recollection she had no reasonable right to that title. She was only nine years old, inclined to plumpness and good humour, deprecated violence and had never been to sea. Need it be added that she did not live in an island and that her name was "Polly."

Perhaps I ought to explain that she had already known other experiences of a purely imaginative character. Part of her existence had been passed as a Beggar Child—solely indicated by a shawl tightly folded round her shoulders and chills,—as a Schoolmistress, unnecessarily severe; as a Preacher, singularly personal in his remarks, and once, after reading one of Cooper's novels, as an Indian Maiden. This was, I believe, the only instance when she had borrowed from another's fiction. Most of the characters that she assumed for days and sometimes weeks at a time