d enough while driving, had now culminated in a highly
rational although unusual aspect. Everything upon her partook of an
unpleasing and surely unnecessary brevity; thus her figure was too
short for her breadth, and her skirts too short for her figure; her
jacket was too short over her hips, and her gloves too short over her
wrists; her hair was too short on her neck and her veil too short over
her nose. Yet the rakish hat settled, and the fobs and seals shaken
out, she appeared mentally fresh and charming, and the rich cadences of
her cultivated voice gave Ringfield pleasure, slightly recalling Miss
Clairville's accents, and he was happy in experiencing for the first
time in his life that amiable naturalness, inimitable airiness, ease
and adaptability, which characterize the Anglican clergy and their
method of doing things. Attenuated tennis, Lilliputian Badminton,
swings, a greased pole, potato and sack races, fiddling, and dancing on
a platform, for the French, all these he passed in review with Mrs.
Abercorn and the English ladies, presently participating in a merry
game of croquet on a rocky, uneven, impossible kind of ground. The
Rev. Marcus, and the person in black silk joined in this game of
croquet, the latter so exclusive that it gave Ringfield the feeling
that people must have when they are chosen for a _quadrille d'honneur_.

Without relief or intermission the amusements held sway till about
half-past four, when even the quality tired of their croquet; the day,
though bright, was cold, and a bonfire on the rocks was greatly
patronized by the very old and very young, while distant preparations
for tea were viewed, at first with stealthy, half-reluctant admiration,
and then with open restlessness. The patriarchs--toothless and
wrinkled, yet not a man of them over fifty-eight--stood around in
expectant silent clusters, and also in their best clothes, of which a
great deal of faded red neck-tie and pepper and salt trousers seemed
chiefly to strike the eye.

The tea was to be served in the large barn adjoining the church,
surrounded on two sides by tall plantations of Indian corn, a rough
kind known as horse corn, and not used at table. Very soon those
engaged in the games fell away by twos and threes, and the rector and
his wife gaily beating the covers afforded by forest and grove, all
gradually converged to the meeting point outside the big doors of the
barn, through which were now passing the wives an