omparison with
other throngs they had seen on the far prairies of Kansas and Iowa.
There were girls with eyes full of liquid light, with dainty bonnets
nestling on their soft hair; their faces were like petals of flowers;
the curves of their chins were more beautiful than chalices of lilies;
their dresses, soft, shapely, of exquisite tones and texture, draped
their perfect bodies. Their slender fingers held gold-and-pearl opera
glasses. The young men who sat beside them wore the latest fashions in
clothing cut from the finest fabrics. Heavy men of brutal bulk slouched
beside their dainty daughters, the purple blotches on their bloated and
lumpy faces showing how politics or business had debauched and
undermined them. Everywhere was the rustle of drapery and soft, musical
speech. All that was lacking in "the round up" at Chiquita was
here--shining, fragrant, and rustling.

* * * * *

The curtain rose upon the fair in Nottinghamshire; and with the sweet
imaginative music as solvent and setting, the gay lads and lassies of
far romance sang and danced under the trees in garments upon which the
rain had never fallen, and unflecked with dust. Knights in splendid
dress of silver and green, with jewelled swords and gay sashes, came
and went, while the merry peasant youths circled and sang task-free and
sin-free.

The scene changed to Sherwood Forest; and there, in the land of Robin
Hood, where snow never falls, where rains never slant through the
shuddering leaves, the jocund foresters met to sing and drink October
ale. There came Little John and Will Scarlet and Alan-a-Dale in
glittering garments, with smooth, fair brows and tuneful voices, to
circle and sing. Fadeless and untarnished was each magnificent cloak
and doublet, slashed with green or purple; straight and fair and supple
was every back and limb. No marks of toil anywhere, no lines of care,
no hopeless hunger, no threatening task; nothing to do but to sing and
dance and drink after the hunt among the delightfully dry and
commodious forest wilds--a glorious, free life! A beautiful,
child-like, dream-like, pagan-like life!

As they looked, and while the music, tuneful, soft, and persuasive,
called to them, a shadow fell upon Ida. That world of care-free,
changeless youth, that world of love and comradeship, threw into
painful relief the actual world from which she came. It brought up with
terrible force the low cottage in t