marred by the failure of Clementina's shoes to
look the Spirit of Summer as well as the rest of her costume. No shoes
at all world have been the very thing, but shoes so shabby and worn down
at one side of the heel as Clementina's were very far from the thing.
Mrs. Milray decided that another fold of cheese-cloth would add to the
statuesque charm of her figure, and give her more height; and she was
richly satisfied with the effect when the Middlemount coach drove up to
the great veranda the next morning, with all the figures of her picture
in position on its roof, and Clementina supreme among them. She herself
mounted in simple, undramatized authority to her official seat beside
the landlord, who in coachman's dress, with a bouquet of autumnal
flowers in his lapel, sat holding his garlanded reins over the backs of
his six horses; and then the coach as she intended it to appear in the
parade set out as soon as the turnouts of the other houses joined it.
They were all to meet at the Middlemount, which was thickly draped and
festooned in flags, with knots of evergreen and the first red boughs of
the young swamp maples holding them in place over its irregular facade.
The coach itself was amass of foliage and flowers, from which it defined
itself as a wheeled vehicle in vague and partial outline; the other
wagons and coaches, as they drove tremulously up, with an effect of
having been mired in blossoms about their spokes and hubs, had
the unwieldiness which seems inseparable from spectacularity. They
represented motives in color and design sometimes tasteless enough, and
sometimes so nearly very good that Mrs. Milray's heart was a great
deal in her mouth, as they arrived, each with its hotel-cry roared and
shrilled from a score of masculine and feminine throats, and finally
spelled for distinctness sake, with an ultimate yell or growl. But she
had not finished giving the lady-representative of a Sunday newspaper
the points of her own tableau, before she regained the courage and the
faith in which she remained serenely steadfast throughout the parade.

It was when all the equipages of the neighborhood had arrived that she
climbed to her place; the ladder was taken away; the landlord spoke to
his horses, and the Middlemount coach led the parade, amid the renewed
slogans, and the cries and fluttered handkerchiefs of the guests
crowding the verandas.

The line of march was by one road to Middlemount Centre, where the prize
was