and of all who could have criticized her for taking
the lead 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withdrawn by the doctor's orders.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