The Log of the Jolly Polly | Page 3

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Etext scanned by Aaron Cannon of Paradise, California

THE LOG OF THE "JOLLY POLLY"
Temptation came to me when I was in the worst possible position to
resist it.
It is a way temptation has. Whenever I swear off drinking invariably I
am invited to an ushers' dinner. Whenever I am rich, only the highbrow
publications that pay the least, want my work. But the moment I am
poverty-stricken the MANICURE GIRL'S MAGAZINE and the ROT
AND SPOT WEEKLY spring at me with offers of a dollar a word.
Temptation always is on the job. When I am down and out temptation
always is up and at me.
When first the Farrells tempted me my vogue had departed. On my
name and "past performances" I could still dispose of what I wrote, but
only to magazines that were just starting. The others knew I no longer
was a best-seller. All the real editors knew it. So did the theatrical
managers.
My books and plays had flourished in the dark age of the
historical-romantic novel. My heroes wore gauntlets and long swords.
They fought for the Cardinal or the King, and each
loved a high-born demoiselle who was a ward of the King or the
Cardinal, and with feminine perversity, always of whichever one her
young man was fighting. With people who had never read Guizot's
"History of France," my books were popular, and for me made a great
deal of money. This was fortunate, for my parents had left me nothing
save expensive tastes. When the tastes became habits, the public left me.
It turned to white-slave and crook plays, and to novels true to life; so
true to life that one felt the author must at one time have been a
masseur in a Turkish bath.
So, my heroines in black velvet, and my heroes with long swords were
"scrapped." As one book reviewer put it, "To expect the public of
to-day to read the novels of Fletcher Farrell is like asking people to
give up the bunny hug and go back to the lancers."
And, to make it harder, I was only thirty years old.
It was at this depressing period in my career that I received a letter
from Fairharbor, Massachusetts, signed Fletcher Farrell. The letter was
written on the business paper of the Farrell Cotton Mills, and asked if I

were related to the Farrells of Duncannon, of the County Wexford, who
emigrated to Massachusetts in 186o. The writer added that he had a
grandfather named Fletcher and suggested we might be related. From
the handwriting of Fletcher Farrell and from the way he ill-treated the
King's English I did not feel the ties of kinship calling me very loud. I
replied briefly that my people originally came from Youghal, in County
Cork, that as early as 1730 they