The Queen of the Pirate Isle

Remember how Little Old New York claimed to be “profusely illustrated”? Well, their definition of “profuse” clearly didn’t agree with mine. I’d be more inclined to apply the phrase to The Queen of the Pirate Isle, written by Bret Harte and illustrated by Kate Greenaway. In general, I like Greenaway’s work, and this batch of illustrations is very enjoyable, despite — or perhaps partly because of — the fact that the main character’s clothes seem to change period at random.

The Leopard Woman Illustrations

I’ve had the illustrations from The Leopard Woman sitting on my desktop for kind of a while now, so I’ve put them up at Flickr. See the rest here.

“Hi, they ‘ve got him!”

‘ “WHERE ‘S Polly?” asked Fan one snowy afternoon, as she came
into the dining-room where Tom was reposing on the sofa with his
boots in the air, absorbed in one of those delightful books in which
boys are cast away on desert islands, where every known fruit,
vegetable and flower is in its prime all the year round; or, lost in
boundless forests, where the young heroes have thrilling
adventures, kill impossible beasts, and, when the author’s
invention gives out, suddenly find their way home, laden with tiger
skins, tame buffaloes and other pleasing trophies of their prowess.

“Dun no,” was Tom’s brief reply, for he was just escaping from an
alligator of the largest size. ‘

That’s from Louisa May Alcott’s An Old Fashioned Girl, which I love, and read about once a year, usually in the late fall, when the real cold weather starts to set in.

Anyway, every time I read it, I get to that passage and have to stop for a moment. I want to read that book Tom is reading. It sounds like the kind of book I’d enjoy. I don’t know how to find books like that, but I’ve been searching at random, and I have an idea that finding just one will somehow give me the magic key to finding all the others.