to
escort the triumphant vehicle homeward by another route, so as to pass as
many houses on the way as possible. It was a curious expression of the
carnival spirit in a region immemorially starved of beauty in the lives
of its people; and whatever was the origin of the mountain coaching
parade, or from whatever impulse of sentimentality or advertising it
came, the effect was of undeniable splendor, and of phantasmagoric
strangeness.

Gregory watched its progress from a hill-side pasture as it trailed
slowly along the rising and falling road. The songs of the young girls,
interrupted by the explosion of hotel slogans and college cries from the
young men, floated off to him on the thin breeze of the cloudless August
morning, like the hymns and shouts of a saturnalian rout going in holiday
processional to sacrifice to their gods. Words of fierce Hebrew poetry
burned in his thought; the warnings and the accusals and the
condemnations of the angry prophets; and he stood rapt from his own time
and place in a dream of days when the Most High stooped to commune face
to face with His ministers, while the young voices of those forgetful or
ignorant of Him, called to his own youth, and the garlanded chariots,
with their banners and their streamers passed on the road beneath him and
out of sight in the shadow of the woods beyond.

When the prize was given to the Middlemount coach at the Center the
landlord took the flag, and gallantly transferred it to Mrs. Milray, and
Mrs. Milray passed it up to Clementina, and bade her, "Wave it, wave it!"

The village street was thronged with people that cheered, and swung their
hats and handkerchiefs to the coach as it left the judges' stand and
drove under the triumphal arch, with the other coaches behind it. Then
Atwell turned his horses heads homewards, and at the brisker pace with
which people always return from festivals or from funerals, he left the
village and struck out upon the country road with his long escort before
him. The crowd was quick to catch the courteous intention of the victors,
and followed them with applause as far beyond the village borders as wind
and limb would allow; but the last noisy boy had dropped off breathless
before they reached a half-finished house in the edge of some woods. A
line of little children was drawn up by the road-side before it, who
watched the retinue with grave eagerness, till the Middlemount coach came
in full sight. Then they sprang into th