ad perhaps none would have willingly relieved her of the trouble.
She freely declared that it was killing her, and she sounded her accents
of despair all over the place. When their dresses were finished she made
the persons of her drama rehearse it on the coach top in the secret of
the barn, where no one but the stable men were suffered to see the
effects she aimed at. But on the eve of realizing these in public she was
overwhelmed by disaster. The crowning glory of her composition was to be
a young girl standing on the highest seat of the coach, in the character
of the Spirit of Summer, wreathed and garlanded with flowers, and
invisibly sustained by the twelve months of the year, equally divided as
to sex, but with the more difficult and painful attitudes assigned to the
gentlemen who were to figure as the fall and winter months. It had been
all worked out and the actors drilled in their parts, when the Spirit of
Summer, who had been chosen for the inoffensiveness of her extreme youth,
was taken with mumps, and withdrawn by the doctor's orders. Mrs. Milray
had now not only to improvise another Spirit of Summer, but had to choose
her from a group of young ladies, with the chance of alienating and
embittering those who were not chosen. In her calamity she asked her
husband what she should do, with but the least hope that he could tell
her. But he answered promptly, "Take Clementina; I'll let you have her
for the day," and then waited for the storm of her renunciations and
denunciations to spend itself.

"To be sure," she said, when this had happened, "it isn't as if she were
a servant in the house; and the position can be regarded as a kind of
public function, anyhow. I can't say that I've hired her to take the
part, but I can give her a present afterwards, and it will be the same
thing."

The question of clothes for Clementina Mrs. Milray declared was almost
as sweeping in its implication as the question of the child's creation.
"She has got to be dressed new from head to foot," she said, "every
stitch, and how am I to manage it in twenty-four hours?"

By a succession of miracles with cheese-cloth, and sashes and ribbons, it
was managed; and ended in a triumph so great that Mrs. Milray took the
girl in her arms and kissed her for looking the Spirit of Summer to a
perfection that the victim of the mumps could not have approached. The
victory was not lastingly marred by the failure of Clementina's shoes to
look the Spir