nice gentlemen, with the funny hats
and green collars, walked out behind the band. And I felt particularly
well disposed toward those most amusing gentlemen who wore, according to
my theory at least, their little girls' aprons tied about their big
waists.

I did not like so well the attendant crowd, but then I could not be
selfish enough to keep people from looking at "my procession" and
enjoying the music that made the blood dance in my own veins, even as my
feet danced on the chill pavement.

I always received an orange on that day from my mother, and almost always
a book, so it was a great event in my life, and I used to get down my
little hat-box and fix the laces in my best shoes days ahead of time that
I might be ready to stand on some steps where I could bow and smile to
the nice gentlemen who walked out in my honor. Heaven only knows how I
got the idea that the procession was meant for me, but it made me very
happy, and my heart was big with love and gratitude for those people who
took so much trouble for me.

I had but two illusions in the world--Santa Claus and "my
procession"--but, alas! on my eighth birthday, when in an outburst of
innocent triumph and joy I cried to a grown-up: "Ain't they good--those
funny gentlemen--to come and march and play music for my birthday?" I was
answered with the assurance that I "was a fool--that no one knew or cared
a copper about me--that it was a Saint, a dead and gone man, they marched
for!"

All the dance went out of my feet, heavy tears fell fast and stood round
and clear on the woolly surface of my cloak, and bending my head low to
hide my disappointment, I went slowly home, where the chair seemed
harder, the hours longer, and life more bare because I had lost the
illusion that had brightened and glorified it.

At the present time, here in my home, there is seated in an arm-chair, a
venerable doll. She is a hideous specimen of the beautiful doll of the
early "fifties." She sits with her soles well turned up, facing you, her
arms hanging from her shoulders in that idiotically helpless
"I-give-it-up" fashion peculiar to dolls. With bulging scarlet cheeks,
button-hole mouth and flat, blue staring eyes she faces Time and
unwinkingly looks him down. To anyone else she is stupidity personified,
but to me she speaks, for she came to me on my fourth Christmas, and she
is as gifted as she is ugly. Only last birthday--as I straightened out
her old, old dress skirt--she asked