be all of them. There's the
Nun-Priest."

"Is that a man or a woman?"

Oswald said he could not be sure by the picture, but Alice and Noel
could be it between them. So that was settled. Then we got the book and
looked at the dresses to see if we could make up dresses for the parts.
At first we thought we would, because it would be something to do, and
it was a very wet day; but they looked difficult, especially the
Miller's. Denny wanted to be the Miller, but in the end he was the
Doctor, because it was next door to Dentist, which is what we call him
for short. Daisy was to be the Prioress--because she is good, and has "a
soft little red mouth," and H. O. _would_ be the Manciple (I don't know
what that is), because the picture of him is bigger than most of the
others, and he said Manciple was a nice portmanteau word--half mandarin
and half disciple.

"Let's get the easiest parts of the dresses ready first," Alice
said--"the pilgrims' staffs and hats and the cockles."

So Oswald and Dicky braved the fury of the elements and went into the
wood beyond the orchard to cut ash-sticks. We got eight jolly good long
ones. Then we took them home, and the girls bothered till we changed our
clothes, which were indeed sopping with the elements we had faced.

Then we peeled the sticks. They were nice and white at first, but they
soon got dirty when we carried them. It is a curious thing: however
often you wash your hands they always seem to come off on anything
white. And we nailed paper rosettes to the tops of them. That was the
nearest we could get to cockle-shells.

"And we may as well have them there as on our hats," Alice said. "And
let's call each other by our right names to-day, just to get into it.
Don't you think so, Knight?"

"Yea, Nun-Priest," Oswald was replying, but Noel said she was only half
the Nun-Priest, and again a threat of unpleasantness darkened the air.
But Alice said:

"Don't be a piggy-wiggy, Noel, dear; you can have it all, I don't want
it. I'll just be a plain pilgrim, or Henry who killed Becket."

So she was called the Plain Pilgrim, and she did not mind.

We thought of cocked hats, but they are warm to wear, and the big garden
hats that make you look like pictures on the covers of plantation songs
did beautifully. We put cockle-shells on them. Sandals we did try, with
pieces of oil-cloth cut the shape of soles and fastened with tape, but
the dust gets into your toes so, and we decided boots w